. 


THE  AMERICAN 
SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  IN   HIS  OFFICE  AT  THE 
CUSTOM  HOUSE,  SALEM 

From  the  painting  by  C.  W.  JeflFerys 


THE-  AMERICAN 
SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

A  CHRONICLE  OF 

GREAT  INTERPRETERS 

BY  BLISS  PERRY1 


NEW   HAVEN:  YALE   UNIVERSITY   PRESS 

TORONTO:  GLASGOW.  BROOK   &   CO. 

LONDON:  HUMPHREY   MILFORD 

OXFORD   UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

1921 


Pf 

a 


Copyright,  1918,  by  Yale  University  Press 


CONTENTS 

I.     THE  PIONEERS  Page  1 

II.    THE  FIRST  COLONIAL  LITERATURE  "  25 

HI.    THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION        "  43 

IV.    THE  REVOLUTION  "  66 

V.    THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP  "  86 

VI.    THE  TRANSCENDENTAllSTS  "  109 

VII.    ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY  "  143 

VIII.     POE  AND  WHITMAN  "  187 

IX.    UNION  AND  LIBERTY  "  206 

X.    A  NEW  NATION  "  234 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE  "  269 

INDEX  •«  273 


vii 


ILLUSTRATION 

NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  IN  HIS 
OFFICE  AT  THE  CUSTOM  HOUSE, 
SALEM 

From  the  painting  by  C.  W.  Jefferys.          Frontispiece 


IX 


THE  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN 
LITERATURE 


CHAPTER  I 

THE   PIONEERS 

THE  United  States  of  America  has  been  from  the 
beginning  in  a  perpetual  change.  The  physical  and 
mental  restlessness  of  the  American  and  the  tem 
porary  nature  of  many  of  his  arrangements  are 
largely  due  to  the  experimental  character  of  the 
exploration  and  development  of  this  continent. 
The  new  energies  released  by  the  settlement  of  the 
colonies  were  indeed  guided  by  stern  determination, 
wise  forethought,  and  inventive  skill;  but  no  one 
has  ever  really  known  the  outcome  of  the  experi 
ment.  It  is  a  story  of  faith,  of 

Effort,  and  expectation,  and  desire, 
And  something  evermore  about  to  be. 


2       AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

An  Alexander  Hamilton  may  urge  with  passion 
ate  force  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution,  without 
any  firm  conviction  as  to  its  permanence.  The 
most  clear-sighted  American  of  the  Civil  War  peri 
od  recognized  this  element  of  uncertainty  in  our 
American  adventure  when  he  declared:  "We  are 
now  testing  whether  this  nation,  or  any  nation  so 
conceived  and  so  dedicated,  can  long  endure." 
More  than  fifty  years  have  passed  since  that  war 
reaffirmed  the  binding  force  of  the  Constitution 
and  apparently  sealed  the  perpetuity  of  the  Union. 
Yet  the  gigantic  economic  and  social  changes  now 
in  progress  are  serving  to  show  that  the  United 
States  has  its  full  share  of  the  anxieties  which  beset 
all  human  institutions  in  this  daily  altering  world. 

"We  are  but  strangers  in  an  inn,  but  passengers 
in  a  ship, "  said  Roger  Williams.  This  sense  of  the 
transiency  of  human  effort,  the  perishable  nature 
of  human  institutions,  was  quick  in  the  conscious 
ness  of  the  gentleman  adventurers  and  sober 
Puritan  citizens  who  emigrated  from  England  to 
the  New  World.  It  had  been  a  familiar  note  in 
the  poetry  of  that  Elizabethan  period  which  had 
followed  with  such  breathless  interest  the  explora 
tion  of  America.  It  was  a  conception  which  could 
be  shared  alike  by  a  saint  like  John  Cotton  or  a 


THE  PIONEERS  3 

soldier  of  fortune  like  John  Smith.  Men  are  tent- 
dwellers.  Today  they  settle  here,  and  tomorrow 
they  have  struck  camp  and  are  gone.  We  are 
strangers  and  sojourners,  as  all  our  fathers  were. 

This  instinct  of  the  camper  has  stamped  itself 
upon  American  life  and  thought.  Venturesome- 
ness,  physical  and  moral  daring,  resourcefulness 
in  emergencies,  indifference  to  negligible  details, 
wastefulness  of  materials,  boundless  hope  and  con 
fidence  in  the  morrow,  are  characteristics  of  the 
American.  It  is  scarcely  an  exaggeration  to  say 
that  the  "good  American"  has  been  he  who  has 
most  resembled  a  good  camper.  He  has  had  ro 
bust  health  —  unless  or  until  he  has  abused  it,  —  a 
tolerant  disposition,  and  an  ability  to  apply  his 
fingers  or  his  brain  to  many  unrelated  and  unex 
pected  tasks.  He  is  disposed  to  blaze  his  own  trail. 
He  has  a  touch  of  prodigality,  and,  withal,  a  knack 
of  keeping  his  tent  or  his  affairs  in  better  order 
than  they  seem.  Above  all,  he  has  been  ever 
ready  to  break  camp  when  he  feels  the  impulse  to 
wander.  He  likes  to  be  "foot-loose."  If  he  does 
not  build  his  roads  as  solidly  as  the  Roman  roads 
were  built,  nor  his  houses  like  the  English  houses, 
it  is  because  he  feels  that  he  is  here  today  and  gone 
tomorrow.  If  he  has  squandered  the  physical 


4       AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

resources  of  his  neighborhood,  cutting  the  forests 
recklessly,'  exhausting  the  soil,  surrendering  water 
power  and  minerals  into  a  few  far-clutching  fingers, 
he  has  done  it  because  he  expects,  like  Voltaire's 
Signor  Pococurante,  "to  have  a  new  garden  to 
morrow,  built  on  a  nobler  plan."  When  New 
York  State  grew  too  crowded  for  Cooper's  Leather- 
Stocking,  he  shouldered  his  pack,  whistled  to  his 
dog,  glanced  at  the  sun,  and  struck  a  bee-line  for 
the  Mississippi.  Nothing  could  be  more  typical  of 
the  first  three  hundred  years  of  American  history. 
The  traits  of  the  pioneer  have  thus  been  the 
characteristic  traits  of  the  American  in  action. 
The  memories  of  successive  generations  have 
tended  to  stress  these  qualities  to  the  neglect  of 
others.  Everyone  who  has  enjoyed  the  free  life 
of  the  woods  will  confess  that  his  own  judgment 
upon  his  casual  summer  associates  turns,  quite 
naturally  and  almost  exclusively,  upon  their 
characteristics  as  woodsmen.  Out  of  the  woods, 
these  gentlemen  may  be  more  or  less  admirable 
divines,  pedants,  men  of  affairs;  but  the  verdict  of 
their  companions  in  the  forest  is  based  chiefly  upon 
the  single  question  of  their  adaptability  to  the 
environment  of  the  camp.  Are  they  quick  of  eye 
and  foot,  skillful  with  rod  and  gun,  cheerful  on 


THE  PIONEERS  5 

rainy  days,  ready  to  do  a  little  more  than  their 
share  of  drudgery?     If  so,  memory  holds  them. 

Some  such  unconscious  selection  as  this  has 
been  at  work  in  the  classification  of  our  representa 
tive  men.  The  building  of  the  nation  and  the  liter 
ary  expression  of  its  purpose  and  ideals  are  tasks 
which  have  called  forth  the  strength  of  a  great 
variety  of  individuals.  Some  of  these  men  have 
proved  to  be  peculiarly  fitted  for  a  specific  service, 
irrespective  of  the  question  of  their  general  intel 
lectual  powers,  or  their  rank  as  judged  by  the 
standard  of  European  performance  in  the  same 
field.  Thus  the  battle  of  New  Orleans,  in  Euro 
pean  eyes  a  mere  bit  of  frontier  fighting,  made 
Andrew  Jackson  a  "hero"  as  indubitably  as  if  he 
had  defeated  Napoleon  at  Waterloo.  It  gave  him 
the  Presidency. 

The  analogy  holds  in  literature.     Certain  ex- 

/ 

pressions  of  American  sentiment  or  conviction 
nave  served  to  summarize  or  to  clarify  the  spirit 
of  the  nation.  The  authors  of  these  productions 
/have  frequently  won  the  recognition  and  affection 
of  their  contemporaries  by  means  of  prose  and 
verse  quite  unsuited  to  sustain  the  test  of  severe 
critical  standards.  Neither  Longfellow's  Excel 
sior  nor  Poe's  Bells  nor  Whittier's  Maud  Midler 


6       AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

is  among  the  best  poems  of  the  three  writers  in 
question,  yet  there  was  something  in  each  of  these 
productions  which  caught  the  fancy  of  a  whole 
American  generation.  It  expressed  one  phase  of 
the  national  mind  in  a  given  historical  period. 

The  historian  of  literature  is  bound  to  take  ac 
count  of  this  question  of  literary  vogue,  as  it  is 
highly  significant  of  the  temper  of  successive  gen 
erations  in  any  country.  But  it  is  of  peculiar 
interest  to  the  student  of  the  literature  produced 
in  the  United  States.  Is  this  literature  "Amer 
ican,"  or  is  it  "English  literature  in  America," 
as  Professor  Wendell  and  other  scholars  have  pre 
ferred  to  call  it?  I  should  be  one  of  the  last  to 
minimize  the  enormous  influence  of  England  upon 
the  mind  and  the  writing  of  all  the  English-speak 
ing  countries  of  the  globe.  Yet  it  will  be  one  of  the 
purposes  of  the  present  book  to  indicate  the  exist 
ence  here,  even  in  colonial  times,  of  a  point  of  view 
differing  from  that  of  the  mother  country,  and 
destined  to  differ  increasingly  with  the  lapse  oi 
time.  Since  the  formation  of  our  Federal  Union, 
in  particular,  the  books  produced  in  the  United 
States  have  tended  to  exhibit  certain  characteris 
tics  which  differentiate  them  from  the  books  pro 
duced  in  other  English-speaking  countries.  We 


THE  PIONEERS  7 

must  beware,  of  course,  of  what  the  late  Charles 
Francis  Adams  once  called  the  "filiopietistic"  fal 
lacy.  The  "American"  qualities  of  our  literature 
must  be  judged  in  connection  with  its  conformity 
to  universal  standards  of  excellence.  Tested  by 
any  universal  standard,  The  Scarlet  Letter  is  a- 
notable  romance.  It  has  won  a  secure  place  among 
the  literature  written  by  men  of  English  blood 
and  speech.  Yet  to  overlook  the  peculiarly 
local  or  provincial  characteristics  of  this  remark 
able  story  is  to  miss  the  secret  of  its  inspiration.  ' 
It  could  have  been  written  only  by  a  New  Eng- 
lander,  in  the  atmosphere  of  a  certain  epoch. 

Our  task,  then,  in  this  rapid  review  of  the  chief 
interpreters  of  the  American  spirit  in  literature, 
is  a  twofold  one.  We  are  primarily  concerned 
with  a  procession  of  men,  each  of  whom  is  interest 
ing  as  an  individual  and  as  a  writer.  But  we  can 
not  watch  the  individuals  long  without  perceiving 
the  general  direction  of  their  march,  the  ideas  that 
animate  them,  the  common  hopes  and  loyalties 
that  make  up  the  life  of  their  spirit.  To  become  j 
aware  of  these  general  tendencies  is  to  under 
stand  the  "American"  note  in  our  national  writing. 

Our  historians  have  taught  us  that  the  history  of 
the  United  States  is  an  evolution  towards  political 


8       AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

unity.  The  separatist,  particularist  movements 
are  gradually  thrust  to  one  side.  In  literary  his 
tory,  likewise,  we  best  remember  those  authors  who 
fall  into  line  with  wThat  we  now  perceive  to  have 
been  the  course  of  our  literary  development.  The 
erratic  men  and  women,  the  "sports"  of  the  great 
experiment,  are  ultimately  neglected  by  the  critics, 
unless,  like  the  leaders  of  political  insurrections, 
those  writing  men  and  women  have  raised  a  nota 
ble  standard  of  revolt.  No  doubt  the  apparently 
unique  literary  specimens,  if  clearly  understood 
in  their  origins  and  surroundings,  would  be  found 
rooted  in  the  general  laws  of  literary  evolution. 
But  these  laws  are  not  easy  to  codify  and  we  must 
avoid  the  temptation  to  discover,  in  any  particular 
period,  more  of  unity  than  there  actually  was. 
And  we  must  always  remember  that  there  will  be 
beautiful  prose  and  verse  unrelated  to  the  main 
national  tendencies  save  as  "the  literature  of  es 
cape.  "  We  owe  this  lesson  to  the  genius  of  Edgar 
Allan  Poe. 

Let  us  test  these  principles  by  applying  them  to 
the  earliest  colonists.  The  first  book  written  on 
the  soil  of  what  is  now  the  United  States  was  Cap 
tain  John  Smith's  True  Relation  of  the  planting  of 
the  Virginia  colony  in  1607.  It  was  published  in 


THE  PIONEERS  9 

London  in  1608.  The  Captain  was  a  typical 
Elizabethan  adventurer,  with  a  gift,  like  so  many 
of  his  class,  for  picturesque  narrative.  In  what 
sense,  if  at  all,  may  his  writings  on  American  topics 
be  classified  as  "American"  literary  productions? 
It  is  clear  that  his  experiences  in  the  New  World 
were  only  one  phase  of  the  variegated  life  of  this 
English  soldier  of  fortune.  But  the  American 
imagination  has  persistently  claimed  him  as  re 
presenting  something  peculiarly  ours,  namely,  a 
kind  of  pioneer  hardihood,  resourcefulness,  leader 
ship,  which  was  essential  to  the  exploration  and 
conquest  of  the  wilderness.  Most  of  Smith's 
companions  were  unfitted  for  the  ordeal  which  he 
survived.  They  perished  miserably  in  the  "starv 
ing  time. "  But  he  was  of  the  stuff  from  which  tri 
umphant  immigrants  have  ever  been  made,  and  it 
is  our  recognition  of  the  presence  of  these  qualities 
in  the  Captain  which  makes  us  think  of  his  books 
dealing  with  America  as  if  they  were  "American 
books."  There  are  other  narratives  by  colonists 
temporarily  residing  in  the  Virginia  plantations 
which  gratify  our  historical  curiosity,  but  which 
we  no  more  consider  a  part  of  American  literature 
than  the  books  written  by  Stevenson,  Kipling, 
and  Wells  during  their  casual  visits  to  this  country. 


10     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

But  Captain  Smith's  True  Relation  impresses  us, 
like  Mark  Twain's  Roughing  It,  with  being  some 
how  true  to  type.  In  each  of  these  books  the 
possible  unveracities  in  detail  are  a  confirmation  of 
their  representative  American  character. 

In  other  words,  we  have  unconsciously  formu 
lated,  in  the  course  of  centuries,  a  general  concept 
of  "the  pioneer. "  Novelists,  poets,  and  historians 
have  elaborated  this  conception.  Nothing  is 
more  inevitable  than  our  reaching  back  to  the 
beginning  of  the  seventeenth  century  and  en 
deavoring  to  select,  among  the  thousands  of 
Englishmen  who  emigrated  or  even  thought  of 
emigrating  to  this  country,  those  who  possessed 
the  genuine  heart  and  sinew  of  the  permanent 
settler. 

Oliver  Cromwell,  for  instance,  is  said  to  have 
thought  of  emigrating  hither  in  1637.  If  he  had 
joined  his  friends  John  Cotton  and  Roger  Williams 
in  New  England,  who  can  doubt  that  the  personal 
characteristics  of  "my  brave  Oliver"  would  today 
be  identified  with  the  "American"  qualities  which 
we  discover  in  1637  on  the  shores  of  Massachusetts 
Bay?  And  what  an  American  settler  Cromwell 
would  have  made! 

If  we  turn  from  physical  and  moral  daring  to  the 


THE  PIONEERS  11 

field  of  theological  and  political  speculation,  it  is 
easy  today  to  select,  among  the  writings  of  the 
earliest  colonists,  certain  radical  utterances  which 
seem  to  presage  the  very  temper  of  the  late  eigh 
teenth  century.  Pastor  John  Robinson's  farewell 
address  to  the  Pilgrims  at  Ley  den  in  1620  contained 
the  famous  words:  "The  Lord  has  more  truth  yet 
to  break  forth  out  of  His  holy  Word.  I  cannot 
sufficiently  bewail  the  condition  of  the  reformed 
churches,  who  are  come  to  a  period  in  religion. 
.  .  .  Luther  and  Calvin  were  great  and  shining 
lights  in  their  times,  yet  they  penetrated  not  into 
the  whole  counsel  of  God. "  Now  John  Robinson, 
like  Oliver  Cromwell,  never  set  foot  on  American 
soil,  but  he  is  identified,  none  the  less,  with  the 
spirit  of  American  liberalism  in  religion. 

In  political  discussion,  the  early  emergence  of 
that  type  of  independence  familiar  to  the  decade 
1765-75  is  equally  striking.  In  a  letter  written  in 
1818,  John  Adams  insisted  that  "the  princi 
ples  and  feelings  which  produced  the  Revolution 
ought  to  be  traced  back  for  two  hundred  years, 
and  sought  in  the  history  of  the  country  from  the 
first  plantations  in  America."  "I  have  always 
laughed,"  he  declared  in  an  earlier  letter,  "at  the 
affectation  of  representing  American  independence 


12     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

as  a  novel  idea,  as  a  modern  discovery,  as  a  late 
invention.  The  idea  of  it  as  a  possible  thing,  as 
a  probable  event,  nay  as  a  necessary  and  unavoid 
able  measure,  in  case  Great  Britain  should  assume 
an  unconstitutional  authority  over  us,  has  been 
familiar  to  Americans  from  the  first  settlement  of 
the  country." 

There  is,  then,  a  predisposition,  a  latent  or 
potential  Americanism  which  existed  long  before 
the  United  States  came  into  being.  Now  that  our 
political  unity  has  become  a  fact,  the  predisposition 
is  certain  to  be  regarded  by  our  own  and  by  future 
generations  as  evidence  of  a  state  of  mind  which 
made  our  separate  national  life  inevitable.  Yet  to 
Thomas  Hutchinson,  a  sound  historian  and  honest 
man,  the  last  Royal  Governor  of  Massachusetts,  a 
separate  national  life  seemed  in  1770  an  unspeak 
able  error  and  calamity. 

The  seventeenth-century  colonists  were  pre 
dominantly  English,  in  blood,  in  traditions,  and  in 
impulses.  \Yhether  we  look  at  Virginia  or  Ply 
mouth  or  at  the  other  colonies  that  were  planted 
in  swift  succession  along  the  seaboard,  it  is  clear 
that  we  are  dealing  primarily  wTith  men  of  the 
English  race.  Most  of  them  would  have  declared, 
with  as  much  emphasis  as  Francis  Hopkinson  a 


THE  PIONEERS  13 

century  later,  "We  of  America  are  in  all  respects 
Englishmen. "  Professor  Edward  Channing  thinks 
that  it  took  a  century  of  exposure  to  colonial  con 
ditions  to  force  the  English  in  America  away  from 
the  traditions  and  ideals  of  those  who  continued 
to  live  in  the  old  land.  But  the  student  of  litera 
ture  must  keep  constantly  in  mind  that  these 
English  colonizers  represented  no  single  type  of  the 
national  character.  There  were  many  men  of 
many  minds  even  within  the  contracted  cabin  of 
the  Mayflower.  The  "sifted  wheat"  was  by  no 
means  all  of  the  same  variety. 

For  Old  England  was  never  more  torn  by  diver 
gent  thought  and  subversive  act  than  in  the  period 
between  the  death  of  Elizabeth  in  1603  and  the 
Revolution  of  1688.  In  this  distracted  time  who 
could  say  what  was  really  "English"?  Was  it 
James  the  First  or  Raleigh?  Archbishop  Laud  or 
John  Cotton?  Charles  the  First  or  Cromwell? 
Charles  the  Second  or  William  Penn?  Was  it 
Churchman,  Presbyterian,  Independent,  Separa 
tist,  Quaker?  One  is  tempted  to  say  that  the 
title  of  Ben  Jonson's  comedy  Every  Man  in  his 
Humour  became  the  standard  of  action  for  two 
whole  generations  of  Englishmen,  and  that  there  is 
no  common  denominator  for  emigrants  of  such 


14     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

varied  pattern  as  Smith  and  Sandys  of  Virginia, 
Morton  of  Merry  mount,  John  Winthrop,  "Sir" 
Christopher  Gardiner  and  Anne  Hutchinson  of 
Boston,  and  Roger  Williams  of  Providence.  They 
seem  as  miscellaneous  as  "Kitchener's  Army." 

It  is  true  that  we  can  make  certain  distinctions. 
Virginia,  as  has  often  been  said,  was  more  like  a 
continuation  of  English  society,  while  New  Eng- 

xland  represented  a  digression  from  English  society. 
There  were  then,  as  now,  "stand-patters"  and 
"progressives."  It  was  the  second  class  who, 
while  retaining  very  conservative  notions  about 
property,  developed  a  fearless  intellectual  radical 
ism  which  has  written  itself  into  the  history  of  the 
United  States.  But  to  the  student  of  early  Amer 
ican  literature  all  such  generalizations  are  of 
limited  value.  He  is  dealing  with  individual  men, 
not  with  "Cavalier"  or  "Roundhead"  as  such* 
He  has  learned  from  recent  historians  to  distrust 
any  such  facile  classification  of  the  first  colonists. 
He  knows  by  this  time  that  there  were  aristocrats 
in  Massachusetts  and  commoners  in  Virginia: 
that  the  Pilgrims  of  Plymouth  were  more  tolerant 

^than  the  Puritans  of  Boston,  and  that  Rhode  Island 
was  more  tolerant  than  either.  Yet  useful  as 
these  general  statements  may  be,  the  interpreter 


THE  PIONEERS  15 

of  men  of  letters  must  always  go  back  of  the  racial 
type  or  the  social  system  to  the  individual  person. 
He  recognizes,  as  a  truth  for  him,  that  theory  of 
creative  evolution  which  holds  that  in  the  ascend 
ing  progress  of  the  race  each  thinking  person  be 
comes  a  species  by  himself. 

While  something  is  gained,  then,  by  remember 
ing  that  the  racial  instincts  and  traditions  of 
the  first  colonists  were  overwhelmingly  English, 
and  that  their  political  and  ethical  views  were 
the  product  of  a  turbulent  and  distraught  time, 
it  is  even  more  important  to  note  how  the  phy 
sical  situation  of  the  colonists  affected  their 
intellectual  and  moral,  as  well  as  their  po 
litical  problems.  Among  the  emigrants  from 
England,  as  we  have  seen,  there  were  great  varieties 
of  social  status,  religious  opinion,  individual  mo 
tive.  But  at  least  they  all  possessed  the  physical 
courage  and  moral  hardihood  to  risk  the  dangerous 
voyage,  the  fearful  hardships,  and  the  vast  uncer 
tainties  of  the  new  life.  To  go  out  at  all,  under  the 
pressure  of  any  motive,  was  to  meet  triumphantly 
a  searching  test.  It  was  in  truth  a  "sifting," 
and  though  a  few  picturesque  rascals  had  the  cour 
age  to  go  into  exile  while  a  few  saints  may  have 
been  deterred,  it  is  a  truism  to  say  that  the 


16     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

pioneers  were  made  up  of  brave  men  and  braver 
women. 

It  cannot  be  asserted  that  their  courage  was  the 
result  of  any  single,  dominating  motive,  equally 
operative  in  all  of  the  colonies.  Mrs.  Hemans's 
familiar  line  about  seeking  "freedom  to  worship 
God"  was  measurably  true  of  the  Pilgrims  of 
Plymouth,  about  whom  she  was  writing.  But  the 
far  more  important  Puritan  emigration  to  Massa 
chusetts  under  Winthrop  aimed  not  so  much  at 
"freedom"  as  at  the  establishment  of  a  theocracy 
according  to  the  Scriptures.  These  men  straight 
way  denied  freedom  of  worship,  not  only  to  new 
comers  who  sought  to  join  them,  but  to  those 
members  of  their  own  company  who  developed 
independent  ways  of  thinking.  The  list  of  motives 
for  emigration  ran  the  whole  gamut,  from  mission 
ary  fervor  for  converting  the  savages,  down 
through  a  commendable  desire  for  gain,  to  the 
perhaps  no  less  praiseworthy  wish  to  escape  a 
debtor's  prison  or  the  pillory.  A  few  of  the  colo 
nists  were  rich.  Some  were  beggars  or  indentured 
servants.  Most  of  them  belonged  to  the  middle 
class.  John  Harvard  was  the  son  of  a  butcher; 
Thomas  Shepard,  the  son  of  a  grocer;  Roger 
Williams,  the  son  of  a  tailor.  But  all  three  were 


THE  PIONEERS  17 

university    bred    and    were    natural    leaders    of 
men. 

Once  arrived  in  the  wilderness,  the  pioneer  life 
common  to  all  of  the  colonists  began  instantly  to 
exert  its  slow,  irresistible  pressure  upon  their 
minds  and  to  mould  them  into  certain  ways  of 
thinking  and  feeling.  Without  some  perception  of 
these  modes  of  thought  and  emotion  a  knowledge 
of  the  spirit  of  our  literature  is  impossible.  Take, 
for  instance,  the  mere  physical  situation  of  the 
first  colonists,  encamped  on  the  very  beach  of  the 
wide  ocean  with  an  illimitable  forest  in  their  rear. 
Their  provisions  were  scanty.  They  grew  watch- 
fulof  the  strange  soil,  of  the  new  skies,  of  the  un 
known  climate.  Even  upon  the  voyage  over, 
John  Winthrop  thought  that  "the  declination  of 
the  pole  star  was  much,  even  to  the  view,  beneath 
that  it  is  in  England,"  and  that  "the  new  moon, 
when  it  first  appeared,  was  much  smaller  than  at 
any  time  he  had  seen  it  in  England. "  Here  was  a 
man  evidently  using  his  eyes  with  a  new  interest 
in  natural  phenomena.  Under  these  changed- 
skies  the  mind  began  gradually  to  change  also. 

At  first  the  colonists  felt  themselves  an  outpost 
of  Europe,  a  forlorn  hope  of  the  Protestant  Reform 
ation.  "We  shall  be  as  a  city  upon  a  hill,"  said 


18     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Winthrop.  "The  eyes  of  all  people  are  upon  us." 
Their  creed  was  Calvinism,  then  in  its  third  gen 
eration  of  dominion  and  a  European  doctrine  which 
was  not  merely  theological  but  social  and  political. 
The  emigrant  Englishmen  were  soon  to  discover 
that  it  contained  a  doctrine  of  human  rights  based 
upon  human  needs.  At  the  beginning  of  their 
novel  experience  they  were  doubtless  unaware  of 
any  alteration  in  their  theories.  But  they  were 
facing  a  new  situation,  and  that  new  situation  be 
came  an  immense  factor  in  their  unconscious 
growth.  Their  intellectual  and  moral  problems 
shifted,  as  a  boat  shifts  her  ballast  when  the  wind 
blows  from  a  new  quarter.  The  John  Cotton 
preaching  in  a  shed  in  the  new  Boston  had  come  to 
"suffer  a  sea-change"  from  the  John  Cotton  wTho 
had  been  rector  of  St.  Botolph's  splendid  church 
in  Lincolnshire.  The  "church  without  a  bishop" 
and  the  "state  without  a  king"  became  a  different 
church  and  state  from  the  old,  however  loyally  the 
ancient  forms  and  phrases  were  retained. 

If  the  political  problems  of  equality  which  were 
latent  in  Calvinism  now  began  to  take  on  a  differ 
ent  meaning  under  the  democratic  conditions  of 
pioneer  life,  the  inner,  spiritual  problems  of  that 
amazing  creed  were  intensified.  "Fallen"  human 


THE  PIONEERS  19 

nature  remained  the  same,  whether  in  the  crowded 
cosmopolitan  streets  of  Holland  and  London,  or 
upon  the  desolate  shores  of  Cape  Cod.  But  the 
moral  strain  of  the  old  insoluble  conflict  between 
"fixed  fate"  and  "free  will"  was  heightened  by  the 
physical  loneliness  of  the  colonists.  Each  soul 
must  fight  its  own  unaided,  unending  battle.  In 
that  moral  solitude,  as  in  the  physical  solitude  of 
the  settlers  upon  the  far  northwestern  prairies  of 
a  later  epoch,  many  a  mind  snapped.  Unnatural 
tension  was  succeeded  by  unnatural  crimes.  But 
for  the  stronger  intellects  New  England  Calvinism 
became  a  potent  spiritual  gymnastic,  where,  as  in 
the  Swedish  system  of  bodily  training,  one  lifts 
imaginary  and  ever-increasing  weights  with  imagi 
nary  and  ever-increasing  effort,  flexor  and  ex 
tensor  muscles  pulling  against  one  another,  driven 
by  the  will.  Calvinism  bred  athletes  as  well  as 
maniacs. 

The  new  situation,  again,  turned  many  of  the 
theoretical  speculations  of  the  colonists  into  prac 
tical  issues.  Here,  for  example,  was  the  Indian. 
Was  he  truly  a  child  of  God,  possessing  a  soul,  and, 
if  so,  had  he  partaken  of  the  sin  of  Adam?  These 
questions  perplexed  the  saintly  Eliot  and  the 
generous  Roger  Williams.  But  before  many 


20     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

years  the  query  as  to  whether  a  Pequot  warrior 
had  a  soul  became  suddenly  less  important  than 
the  practical  question  as  to  whether  the  Pequot 
should  be  allowed  any  further  chances  of  taking 
the  white  man's  scalp.  On  this  last  issue  the 
colonists  were  unanimous  in  the  negative. 

It  would  be  easy  to  multiply  such  instances  of  a 
gradual  change  of  view.  But  beneath  all  the 
changes  and  all  the  varieties  of  individual  behavior 
in  the  various  colonies  that  began  to  dot  the  sea 
board,  certain  qualities  demanded  by  the  new  sur 
roundings  are  felt  in  colonial  life  and  in  colonial 
writings.  One  of  these  is  the  instinct  for  order,  or 
at  least  that  degree  of  order  essential  to  the  exist 
ence  of  a  camp.  It  was  not  in  vain  that  John 
Smith  sought  to  correct  the  early  laxness  at  James 
town  by  the  stern  edict:  "He  that  will  not  wrork, 
neither  shall  he  eat. "  Dutch  and  Quaker  colonies 
taught  the  same  inexorable  maxim  of  thrift. 
Soon  there  was  work  enough  for  all,  at  good  wages, 
but  the  lesson  had  been  taught.  It  gave  Franklin's 
Poor  Richard  mottoes  their  flavor  of  homely,  ex 
perienced  truth. 

Order  in  daily  life  led  straight  to  political  order, 
just  as  the  equality  and  resourcefulness  of  the 
frontier,  stimulated  by  isolation  from  Europe,  led 


THE  PIONEERS  21 

to  political  independence.  The  pioneer  learned 
to  make  things  for  himself  instead  of  sending  to 
London  for  them,  and  by  and  by  he  grew  as  im 
patient  of  waiting  for  a  political  edict  from  London 
as  he  would  become  in  waiting  for  a  London  plough. 
"This  year,"  wrote  one  colonist,  "ye  will  go  to 
complain  to  the  Parliament,  and  the  next  year  they 
will  send  to  see  how  it  is,  and  the  third  year  the 
government  is  changed."  The  time  was  coming 
when  no  more  complaints  would  be  sent. 

One  of  the  most  startling  instances  of  this 
colonial  instinct  for  self-government  is  the  case  of 
Thomas  Hooker.  Trained  in  Emmanuel  College 
of  the  old  Cambridge,  he  arrived  in  the  new  Cam 
bridge  in  1633.  He  grew  restless  under  its  theo 
cratic  government,  being,  it  was  said,  "a  person 
who  when  he  was  doing  his  Master's  work  would 
put  a  king  into  his  pocket. "  So  he  led  the  famous 
migration  of  1636  from  Massachusetts  to  Hartford, 
and  there  helped  to  create  a  federation  of  inde 
pendent  towns  which  made  their  own  constitution 
without  mentioning  any  king,  and  became  one  of 
the  corner-stones  of  American  democracy.  In 
May,  1638,  Hooker  declared  in  a  sermon  before 
the  General  Court  "that  the  choice  of  public 
magistrates  belongs  unto  the  people  by  God's 


22     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

own  allowance,"  and  "that  they  who  have  the 
power  to  appoint  officers  and  magistrates,  it  is  in 
their  power,  also,  to  set  the  bounds  and  limitations 
of  the  power  and  place  into  which  they  call  them." 
The  reason  of  this  is:  "Because  the  foundation 
of  authority  is  laid,  firstly,  in  the  free  consent  of 
the  people."  This  high  discourse  antedates  the 
famous  pamphlets  on  liberty  by  Milton.  It  is  a 
half-century  earlier  than  Locke's  Treatise  on 
Government,  a  century  and  a  quarter  earlier  than 
Rousseau's  Contrat  Social,  and  it  precedes  by  one 
hundred  and  thirty-eight  years  the  American 
Declaration  of  Independence. 

But  the  slightest  acquaintance  with  colonial 
writings  will  reveal  the  fact  that  such  political 
radicalism  as  Thomas  Hooker's  was  accompanied 
by  an  equally  striking  conservatism  in  other  direc 
tions.  One  of  these  conservative  traits  was  the 
pioneer's  respect  for  property,  and  particularly 
for  the  land  cleared  by  his  own  toil.  Gladstone 
once  spoke  of  possession  of  the  soil  as  the  most 
important  and  most  operative  of  all  social  facts. 
Free-footed  as  the  pioneer  colonist  was,  he  was 
disinclined  to  part  with  his  land  without  a  sub 
stantial  price  for  it.  The  land  at  his  disposal  was 
practically  illimitable,  but  he  showed  a  very 


THE  PIONEERS  23 

English  tenacity  in  safeguarding  his  hold  upon  his 
own  portion. 

Very  English,  likewise,  was  his  attachment  to 
the  old  country  as  "home."  The  lighter  and  the 
more  serious  writings  of  the  colonists  are  alike  in 
their  respect  for  the  past.  In  the  New  England 
settlements,  although  not  at  first  in  Virginia, 
there  was  respect  for  learning  and  for  an  educated 
clergy.  The  colonists  revered  the  Bible.  They 
maintained  a  stubborn  regard  for  the  Common 
Law  of  England.  Even  amid  all  the  excitement  of 
a  successful  rebellion  from  the  mother  country,  this 
Common  Law  still  held  the  Americans  to  the  ex 
perience  of  the  inescapable  past. 

Indeed,  as  the  reader  of  today  lifts  his  eyes  from 
the  pages  of  the  books  written  in  America  during 
the  seventeenth  century,  and  tries  to  meditate 
upon  the  general  difference  between  them  and  the 
English  books  written  during  the  same  period,  he 
will  be  aware  of  the  firmness  with  which  the  con 
servative  forces  held  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic. 
It  was  only  one  hundred  years  from  the  Great 
Armada  of  1588  to  the  flight  of  James  Second,  the 
last  of  the  Stuart  Kings.  With  that  Revolution 
of  1688  the  struggles  characteristic  of  the  seven 
teenth  century  in  England  came  to  an  end.  A  new 


24     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

working  basis  is  found  for  thought,  politics,  soci 
ety,  literature.  But  while  those  vast  changes  had 
been  shaking  England,  two  generations  of  Amer 
ican  colonists  had  cleared  their  forests,  fought  the 
savages,  organized  their  townships  and  their  trade, 
put  money  in  their  purses,  and  lived,  though  as  yet 
hardly  suspecting  it,  a  life  that  was  beginning  to 
differentiate  them  from  the  men  of  the  Old  World. 
We  must  now  glance  at  the  various  aspects  of  this 
isolated  life  of  theirs,  as  it  is  revealed  in  their  books. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE   FIRST    COLONIAL   LITERATURE 

THE  simplest  and  oldest  group  of  colonial  writings 
is  made  up  of  records  of  exploration  and  adventure. 
They  are  like  the  letters  written  from  California  in 
1849  to  the  "folks  back  East."  Addressed  to 
home-keeping  Englishmen  across  the  sea,  they 
describe  the  new  world,  explain  the  present  situa 
tion  of  the  colonists,  and  express  their  hopes  for 
the  future.  Captain  John  Smith's  True  Relation, 
already  alluded  to,  is  the  typical  production  of  this 
class:  a  swift  marching  book,  full  of  eager  energy, 
of  bluff  and  breezy  picturesqueness,  and  of  trium 
phant  instinct  for  the  main  chance.  Like  most  of 
the  Elizabethans,  he  cannot  help  poetizing  in  his 
prose.  Cod-fishing  is  to  him  a  "sport";  "and 
what  sport  doth  yeald  a  more  pleasing  content, 
and  lesse  hurt  or  charge  then  angling  with  a  hooke, 
and  crossing  the  sweete  ayre  from  Isle  to  Isle, 
over  the  silent  streams  of  a  calme  Sea?"  But  the 

25 


26     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

gallant  Captain  is  also  capable  of  very  plain  speech, 
Cromwellian  in  its  simplicity,  as  when  he  writes 
back  to  the  London  stockholders  of  the  Virginia 
Company:  "When  you  send  again,  I  entreat  you 
rather  send  but  thirty  carpenters,  husbandmen, 
gardeners,  fishermen,  blacksmiths,  masons,  and 
diggers  up  of  trees'  roots,  well  provided,  than  a 
thousand  of  such  as  we  have." 

America  was  but  an  episode  in  the  wide  wander 
ings  of  Captain  Smith,  but  he  owes  his  place  in 
human  memory  today  to  the  physical  and  mental 
energy  with  which  he  met  the  demands  of  a  new 
situation,  and  to  the  vividness  with  which  he 
dashed  down  in  words  whatever  his  eyes  had  seen. 
Whether,  in  that  agreeable  passage  about  Poca- 
hontas,  he  was  guilty  of  romancing  a  little,  no  one 
really  knows,  but  the  Captain,  as  the  first  teller  of 
this  peculiarly  American  type  of  story,  will  con 
tinue  to  have  an  indulgent  audience. 

But  other  exiles  in  Virginia  were  skillful  with  the 
pen.  William  Strachey's  True  Reportory  of  the 
Wrack  of  Sir  Thomas  Gates,  Kt.,  vpon  and  from  the 
islands  of  the  Bermudas  may  or  may  not  have  given 
a  hint  to  Shakespeare  for  the  storm-scene  in  The 
Tempest.  In  either  case  it  is  admirable  writing, 
flexible,  sensitive,  shrewdly  observant.  Whitaker, 


THE  FIRST  COLONIAL  LITERATURE     27 

the  apostle  of  Virginia,  mingles,  like  many  a  mis 
sionary  of  the  present  day,  the  style  of  an  exhorter 
with  a  keen  discernment  of  the  traits  of  the  savage 
mind.  George  Percy,  fresh  from  Northumberland, 
tells  in  a  language  as  simple  as  Defoe's  the  piteous 
tale  of  five  months  of  illness  and  starvation, 
watched  by  "those  wild  and  cruel  Pagans. "  John 
Pory,  of  "the  strong  potations,"  who  thinks  that 
"good  company  is  the  soul  of  this  life,"  neverthe 
less  comforts  himself  in  his  solitude  among  the 
"crystal  rivers  and  odoriferous  woods"  by  reflecting 
that  he  is  escaping  envy  and  expense.  George 
Sandys,  scholar  and  poet,  finds  his  solace  during 
a  Virginia  exile  in  continuing  his  translation  of 
Ovid's  Metamorphoses.  Colonel  Norwood,  an  ad 
venturer  who  belongs  to  a  somewhat  later  day, 
since  he  speaks  of  having  "read  Mr.  Smith's 
travels, "  draws  the  long  bow  of  narrative  quite  as 
powerfully  as  the  redoubtable  Smith,  and  far  more 
smoothly,  as  witness  his  accounts  of  starvation  on 
shipboard  and  cannibalism  on  shore.  This  Colonel 
is  an  artist  who  would  have  delighted  Stevenson. 

All  of  these  early  tellers  of  Virginia  tales  were 
Englishmen,  and  most  of  them  returned  to  Eng 
land,  where  their  books  were  printed  and  their 
remaining  lives  were  passed.  But  far  to  the  north- 


28     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

east  of  Virginia  there  were  two  colonies  of  men  who 
earned  the  right  to  say,  in  William  Bradford's 
quiet  words,  "It  is  not  with  us  as  with  other  men, 
whom  small  things  can  discourage,  or  small  dis 
contentments  cause  to  wish  themselves  at  home 
again."  One  was  the  colony  of  Pilgrims  at  Ply 
mouth,  headed  by  Bradford  himself.  The  other 
was  the  Puritan  colony  of  Massachusetts  Bay, 
with  John  Winthrop  as  governor. 

Bradford  and  Winthrop  have  left  journals  which 
are  more  than  chronicles  of  adventure.  They 
record  the  growth  and  government  of  a  com 
monwealth.  Both  Bradford  and  Winthrop  were 
natural  leaders  of  men,  grave,  dignified,  solid,  en 
dowed  with  a  spirit  that  bred  confidence.  Each 
was  learned.  Winthrop,  a  lawyer  and  man  of 
property,  had  a  higher  social  standing  than  Brad 
ford,  who  was  one  of  the  Separatists  of  Robinson's 
flock  at  Leyden.  But  the  Pilgrim  of  the  May 
flower  and  the  well-to-do  Puritan  of  the  Bay  Colony 
both  wrote  their  annals  like  gentlemen  and  schol 
ars.  Bradford's  History  of  Plymouth  Plantation 
runs  from  1620  to  1647.  Winthrop's  diary,  now 
printed  as  the  History  of  New  England,  begins 
with  his  voyage  in  1630  and  closes  in  the  year  of 
his  death,  1649.  As  records  of  an  Anglo-Saxon 


THE  FIRST  COLONIAL  LITERATURE     29 

experiment  in  self-government  under  pioneer  con 
ditions  these  books  are  priceless;  as  human  docu 
ments,  they  illuminate  the  Puritan  character;  as 
for  "literary"  value  in  the  narrow  sense  of  that 
word,  neither  Bradford  nor  Winthrop  seems  to 
have  thought  of  literary  effect.  Yet  the  leader  of 
the  Pilgrims  has  passages  of  grave  sweetness  and 
charm,  and  his  sketch  of  his  associate,  Elder 
Brewster,  will  bear  comparison  with  the  best 
English  biographical  writing  of  that  century. 
Winthrop  is  perhaps  more  varied  in  tone,  as  he  is 
in  matter,  but  he  writes  throughout  as  a  ruler  of 
men  should  write,  with  "decent  plainness  and 
manly  freedom."  His  best  known  pages,  justly 
praised  by  Tyler  and  other  historians  of  American 
thought,  contain  his  speech  before  the  General 
Court  in  1645  on  the  nature  of  true  liberty.  No 
paragraphs  written  in  America  previous  to  the 
Revolution  would  have  given  more  pleasure  to 
Abraham  Lincoln,  but  it  is  to  be  feared  that  Lin 
coln  never  saw  Governor  Winthrop's  book,  though 
his  own  ancestor,  Samuel  Lincoln  of  Hingham, 
lived  under  Winthrop's  jurisdiction. 

The  theory  of  government  held  by  the  dominant 
party  of  the  first  two  generations  of  New  England 
pioneers  has  often  been  called  a  "theocracy," 


30     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

that  is  to  say,  a  government  according  to  the  Word 
of  God  as  expounded  and  enforced  by  the  clergy. 
The  experiment  was  doomed  to  ultimate  failure, 
for  it  ran  counter  to  some  of  the  noblest  instincts 
of  human  nature.  But  its  administration  was  in 
the  hands  of  able  men.  The  power  of  the  clergy 
was  well-nigh  absolute.  The  political  organiza 
tion  of  the  township  depended  upon  the  ecclesias 
tical  organization  as  long  as  the  right  to  vote  was 
confined  to  church  members.  How  sacrosanct 
and  awful  was  the  position  of  the  clergyman  may 
be  perceived  from  Hawthorne's  The  Minister's 
Black  Veil  and  The  Scarlet  Letter. 

Yet  it  must  be  said  that  men  like  Hooker  and 
Cotton,  Shepard  and  Norton,  had  every  instinct 
and  capacity  for  leadership.  With  the  notable 
exception  of  Hooker,  such  men  were  aristocrats, 
holding  John  Winthrop's  opinion  that  "Democracy 
is,  among  most  civil  nations,  accounted  the  mean 
est  and  worst  form  of  government."  They  were 
fiercely  intolerant.  The  precise  reason  for  the 
Hooker  migration  from  Cambridge  to  Hartford 
in  1636  —  the  very  year  of  the  founding  of  Harvard 
—  was  prudently  withheld,  but  it  is  now  thought 
to  be  the  instinct  of  escape  from  the  clerical  ar 
chitects  of  the  Cambridge  Platform.  Yet  no  one 


THE  FIRST  COLONIAL  LITERATURE     31 

would  today  call  Thomas  Hooker  a  liberal  in  re 
ligion,  pioneer  in  political  liberty  though  he  proved 
to  be.  His  extant  sermons  have  the  steady  stroke 
of  a  great  hammer,  smiting  at  the  mind  and  heart. 
"Others  because  they  have  felt  the  heavy  hand 
of  God  .  .  .  upon  these  grounds  they  build  their 
hopes :  '  I  have  had  my  hell  in  this  life,  and  I  hope 
to  have  heaven  in  the  world  to  come;  I  hope  the 
worst  is  over."  Not  so,  thunders  the  preacher 
in  reply:  "Sodom  and  Gomorrah  they  burnt  in 
brimstone  and  they  shall  burn  in  hell."  One  of 
Hooker's  successors  has  called  him  "a  son  of 
thunder  and  a  son  of  consolation  by  turns."  The 
same  may  be  said  of  Thomas  Shepard,  another 
graduate  of  Emmanuel  College  in  the  old  Cam 
bridge,  who  became  the  "soul-melting  preacher" 
of  the  newer  Cambridge  by  the  Charles.  Pure, 
ravishing  notes  of  spiritual  devotion  still  sing 
themselves  in  his  pages.  He  is  wholly  Calvinist. 
He  thinks  "the  truth  is  a  poor  mean  thing  in  itself" 
and  that  the  human  reason  cannot  be  "the  last 
resolution  of  all  doubts,"  which  must  be  sought 
only  in  the  written  Word  of  God.  He  holds  it  "  a 
tough  work,  a  wonderful  hard  matter  to  be  saved. " 
"Jesus  Christ  is  not  got  with  a  wet  finger."  Yet, 
like  so  many  mystics,  he  yearns  to  be  "covered 


32     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

with  God,  as  with  a  cloud,"  to  be  "drowned, 
plunged,  and  swallowed  up  with  God."  One 
hundred  years  later  we  shall  find  this  same  rhap 
sodic  ecstasy  in  the  meditations  of  Jonathan 
Edwards. 

John  Cotton,  the  third  of  the  mighty  men  in  the 
early  Colonial  pulpit,  owes  his  fame  more  to  his 
social  and  political  influence  than  to  his  literary 
power.  Yet  even  that  was  thought  commanding. 
Trained,  like  Hooker  and  Shepard,  at  Emmanuel 
College,  and  fresh  from  the  rectorship  of  St. 
Botolph's  in  the  Lincolnshire  Boston,  John  Cotton 
dominated  that  new  Boston  which  was  named  in 
his  honor.  He  became  the  Pope  of  the  theocracy; 
a  clever  Pope  and  not  an  unkindly  one.  He  seems 
to  have  shared  some  of  the  opinions  of  Anne 
Hutchinson,  though  he  '"pronounced  the  sentence 
of  admonition"  against  her,  says  Winthrop,  with 
much  zeal  and  detestation  of  her  errors.  Haw 
thorne,  in  one  of  his  ironic  moods,  might  have 
done  justice  to  this  scene.  Cotton  was  at  heart 
too  liberal  for  his  role  of  Primate,  and  fate  led  him 
to  persecute  a  man  whose  very  name  has  become 
a  symbol  of  victorious  tolerance,  Roger  Williams. 

Williams,  known  today  as  a  friend  of  Cromwell, 
Milton,  and  Sir  Harry  Vane,  had  been  exiled  from 


THE  FIRST  COLONIAL  LITERATURE     33 

Massachusetts  for  maintaining  that  the  civil  power 
had  no  jurisdiction  over  conscience.  This  doc 
trine  was  fatal  to  the  existence  of  a  theocratic  state 
dominated  by  the  church.  John  Cotton  was  per 
fectly  logical  in  "enlarging"  Roger  Williams  into 
the  wilderness,  but  he  showed  less  than  his  usual 
discretion  in  attacking  the  quick-tempered  Welsh 
man  in  pamphlets.  It  was  like  asking  Hotspur  if 
he  would  kindly  consent  to  fight.  Back  and  forth 
the  books  fly,  for  Williams  loves  this  game.  His 
Bloody  Tenet  of  Persecution  for  Cause  of  Conscience 
calls  forth  Mr.  Cotton's  Bloody  Tenet  washed  and 
made  white  in  the  Blood  of  the  Lamb;  and  this  in 
turn  provokes  the  torrential  flood  of  Williams's 
masterpiece,  The  Bloody  Tenet  yet  more  Bloody,  by 
Mr.  Cotton's  endeavor  to  wash  it  white  in  the  Blood 
of  the  Lamb.  There  is  glorious  writing  here,  and 
its  effect  cannot  be  suggested  by  quoting  sentences. 
But  there  is  one  sentence  in  a  letter  written  by 
Williams  in  his  old  age  to  his  fellow-townsmen  of 
Providence  which  points  the  whole  moral  of  the 
terrible  mistake  made  by  the  men  who  sought^ 
spiritual  liberty  in  America  for  themselves,  only  '- 
to  deny  that  same  liberty  to  others.  "I  have  only 
one  motion  and  petition, "  begs  this  veteran  pioneer 
who  had  forded  many  a  swollen  stream  and  built 


34     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

many  a  rude  bridge  in  the  Plantations:  "it  is  this, 
that  after  you  have  got  over  the  black  brook  of 
some  soul  bondage  yourselves,  you  tear  not  down 
the  bridge  after  you. " 

It  is  for  such  wise  and  humane  counsels  as  this 
that  Roger  Williams  is  remembered.  His  op 
ponents  had  mightier  intellects  than  his,  but  the 
world  has  long  since  decided  against  them.  Co 
lonial  sermon  literature  is  read  today  chiefly  by 
antiquarians  who  have  no  sympathy  for  the  creed 
which  once  gave  it  vitality.  Its  theology,  like  the 
theology  of  Paradise  Lost  or  the  Divine  Comedy, 
has  sunk  to  the  bottom  of  the  black  brook.  But 
we  cannot  judge  fairly  the  contemporary  effect 
of  this  pulpit 'literature  without  remembering  the 
passionate  faith  that '  made  pulpit  and  pews  co 
partners  in  a  supreme  spiritual  struggle.  His 
torians  properly  insist  upon  the  aesthetic  poverty 
of  the  New  England  Puritans;  that  their  rule  of 
life  cut  them  off  from  an  enjoyment  of  the  dra 
matic  literature  of  their  race,  then  just  closing  its 
most  splendid  epoch;  that  they  had  little  poetry 
or  music  and  no  architecture  and  plastic  art.  But 
we  must  never  forget  that  to  men  of  their  creed 
the  Sunday  sermons  and  the  week-day  "lectures" 
served  as  oratory,  poetry,  and  drama.  These 


THE  FIRST  COLONIAL  LITERATURE     35 

outpourings  of  the  mind  and  heart  of  their  spiritual 
leaders  were  the  very  stuff  of  human  passion  in 
its  intensest  forms.  Puritan  churchgoers,  passing 
hours  upon  hours  every  week  in  rapt  absorption 
with  the  noblest  of  all  poetry  and  prose  in  the  pages 
of  their  chief  book,  the  Bible,  were  at  least  as  sensi 
tive  to  the  beauty  of  words  and  the  sweep  of 
emotion^  as  our  contemporaries  upon  whose 
book-shelves  Spenser  and  Milton  stand  unread. 

It  is  only  by  entering  into  the  psychology  of  the 
period  that  we  can  estimate  its  attitude  towards 
the  poetry  written  by  the  pioneers  themselves. 
The  Bay  Psalm  Book  (1640),  the  first  book  printed 
in  the  colonies,  is  a  wretched  doggerel  arrangement 
of  the  magnificent  King  James  Version  of  the 
Psalms,  designed  to  be  sung  in  churches.  Few  of 
the  New  England  churches  could  sing  more  than 
half-a-dozen  tunes,  and  a  pitch-pipe  was  for  a  long 
time  the  only  musical  instrument  allowed.  Judged 
as  hymnology  or  poetry,  the  Bay  Psalm  Book 
provokes  a  smile.  But  the  men  and  women  who 
used  it  as  a  handbook  of  devotion  sang  it  with  their 
hearts  aflame.  In  judging  such  a  popular  seven 
teenth-century  poem  as  Wigglesworth's  Day  of 
Doom  one  must  strip  oneself  quite  free  from  the 
twentieth  century,  and  pretend  to  be  sitting  in  the 


\ 

36     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

chimney-corner  of  a  Puritan  kitchen,  reading 
aloud  by  that  firelight  which,  as  Lowell  once 
humorously  suggested,  may  have  added  a  "live 
lier  relish"  to  the  poet's  "premonitions  of  eternal 
combustion. "  Lowell  could  afford  to  laugh  about 
it,  having  crossed  that  particular  black  brook. 
But  for  several  generations  the  boys  and  girls  of 
New  England  had  read  the  Day  of  Doom  as  if 
Mr.  Wigglesworth,  the  gentle  and  somewhat 
sickly  minister  of  Maiden,  had  veritably  peeped 
into  Hell.  It  is  the  present  fashion  to  under 
estimate  the  power  of  Wigglesworth's  verse.  At 
its  best  it  has  a  trampling,  clattering  shock  like  a 
charge  of  cavalry  and  a  sound  like  clanging  steel. 
Mr.  Kipling  and  other  cunning  ballad-makers 
have  imitated  the  peculiar  rhyme  structure  chosen 
by  the  nervous  little  parson.  But  no  living  poet 
can  move  his  readers  to  the  fascinated  horror  once 
felt  by  the  Puritans  as  they  followed  Wiggles- 
worth's  relentless  gaze  into  the  future  of  the  soul's 
destiny. 

Historical  curiosity  may  still  linger,  of  course, 
over  other  verse-writers  of  the  period.  Anne 
Bradstreet's  poems,  for  instance,  are  not  without 
grace  and  womanly  sweetness,  in  spite  of  their 
didactic  themes  and  portentous  length.  But  this 


THE  FIRST  COLONIAL  LITERATURE     37 

lady,  born  in  England,  the  daughter  of  Governor 
Dudley  and  later  the  wife  of  Governor  Bradstreet, 
chose  to  imitate  the  more  fantastic  of  the  moraliz 
ing  poets  of  England  and  France.  There  is  little 
in  her  hundreds  of  pages  which  seems  today  the 
inevitable  outcome  of  her  own  experience  in  the 
New  World.  For  readers  who  like  roughly  mis 
chievous  satire,  of  a  type  initiated  in  England  by 
Bishop  Hall  and  Donne,  there  is  The  Simple 
Cobbler  of  Agawam  written  by  the  roving  clergy 
man  Nathaniel  Ward.  But  he  lived  only  a  dozen 
years  in  Massachusetts,  and  his  satirical  pictures 
are  scarcely  more  "American"  than  the  satire 
upon  German  professors  in  Sartor  Resartus  is 
"German."  Like  Charles  Dickens's  American 
Notes,  Ward's  give  the  reaction  of  a  born  English 
man  in  the  presence  of  the  sights  and  the  talk  and 
the  personages  of  the  transatlantic  world. 

Of  all  the  colonial  writings  of  the  seventeenth 
century,  those  that  have  lost  least  of  their  interest 
through  the  lapse  of  years  are  narratives  of  strug 
gles  with  the  Indians.  The  image  of  the  "bloody 
savage"  has  always  hovered  in  the  background  of 
the  American  imagination.  Our  boys  and  girls  have 
"played  Indian"  from  the  beginning,  and  the  actual 
Indian  is  still  found,  as  for  three  hundred  years  past, 


38     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

upon  the  frontier  fringe  of  our  civilization.  Nov 
elists  like  Cooper,  historians  like  Parkman,  poets 
like  Longfellow,  have  dealt  with  the  rich  material 
offered  by  the  life  of  the  aborigines,  but  the  long 
series  begins  writh  the  scribbled  story  of  colonists. 
Here  are  comedy  and  tragedy,  plain  narratives  of 
trading  and  travel,  missionary  zeal  and  triumphs; 
then  the  inevitable  alienation  of  the  two  races  and 
the  doom  of  the  native. 

The  "noble  savage"  note  may  be  found  in  John 
Rolfe,  the  husband  of  Pocahontas,  with  whom, 
poor  fellow,  his  "best  thoughts  are  so  intangled 
and  enthralled."  Other  Virginians,  like  Smith, 
Strachey,  and  Percy,  show  close  naturalistic  ob 
servation,  touched  with  the  abounding  Elizabethan 
zest  for  novelties.  To  Alexander  Whitaker,  how 
ever,  these  "naked  slaves  of  the  devil"  were  "not 
so  simple  as  some  have  supposed."  He  yearned 
and  labored  over  their  souls,  as  did  John  Eliot 
and  Roger  Williams  and  Daniel  Gookin  of  New 
England.  In  the  Pequot  War  of  1637  the  grim 
settlers  resolved  to  be  rid  of  that  tribe  once  for  all, 
and  the  narratives  of  Captain  Edward  Johnson  and 
Captain  John  Mason,  who  led  in  the  storming 
and  slaughter  at  the  Indians'  Mystic  Fort,  are  as 
piously  relentless  as  anything  in  the  Old  Testa- 


THE  FIRST  COLONIAL  LITERATURE     39 

ment.  Cromwell  at  Drogheda,  not  long  after,  had 
soldiers  no  more  merciless  than  these  extermina 
ting  Puritans,  who  wished  to  plough  their  fields 
henceforth  in  peace.  A  generation  later  the  storm 
broke  again  in  King  Philip's  War.  Its  tales  of 
massacre,  captivity,  and  single-handed  fighting 
linger  in  the  American  imagination  still.  Typical 
pamphlets  are  Mary  Rowlandson's  thrilling  tale 
of  the  Lancaster  massacre  and  her  subsequent 
captivity,  and  the  loud-voiced  Captain  Church's 
unvarnished  description  of  King  Philip's  death. 
The  King,  shot  down  like  a  wearied  bull-moose  in 
the  deep  swamp,  "fell  upon  his  face  in  the  mud 
and  water,  with  his  gun  under  him."  They 
"drew  him  through  the  mud  to  the  upland;  and 
a  doleful,  great,  naked  dirty  beast  he  looked  like. " 
The  head  brought  only  thirty  shillings  at  Ply 
mouth:  "scanty  reward  and  poor  encouragement, " 
thouglit  Captain  Church.  William  Hubbard, 
the  minister  of  Ipswich,  wrote  a  comprehensive 
Narrative  of  the  Troubles  with  the  Indians  in  New 
England,  bringing  the  history  down  to  1677. 
Under  the  better  known  title  of  Indian  Wars,  this 
fervid  and  dramatic  tale,  penned  in  a  quiet  par 
sonage,  has  stirred  the  pulses  of  every  succeeding 
generation. 


40     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

The  close  of  King  Philip's  War,  1676,  coinciding 
as  it  does  with  Bacon's  Rebellion  in  Virginia,  marks 
an  era  in  the  development  of  our  independent  life. 
The  events  of  that  year,  in  the  words  of  Professor 
Tyler,  "established  two  very  considerable  facts, 
namely,  that  English  colonists  in  America  could 
be  so  provoked  as  to  make  physical  resistance  to 
the  authority  of  England,  and,  second,  that  English 
colonists  in  America  could,  in  the  last  resort,  put 
down  any  combination  of  Indians  that  might  be 
formed  against  them.  In  other  words,  it  was  then 
made  evident  that  English  colonists  would  cer 
tainly  be  safe  in  the  new  world,  and  also  that  they 
would  not  always  be  colonists. " 

While  the  end  of  an  historical  or  literary  era 
cannot  always  be  thus  conveniently  indicated  by  a 
date,  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  final  quarter  of  the 
seventeenth  century  witnessed  deep  changes  in  the 
outward  life  and  the  inner  temper  of  the  colonists. 
The  "first  fine  careless  rapture"  was  over.  Only 
a  few  aged  men  could  recall  the  memory  of  the 
first  settlements.  Between  the  founding  of  James 
town  and  the  rebellion  under  the  leadership  of 
Nathaniel  Bacon  almost  seventy  years  had  inter 
vened,  an  interval  corresponding  to  that  which 
separates  us  from  the  Mexican  War.  Roger  Wil- 


THE  FIRST  COLONIAL  LITERATURE     41 

liams  ended  his  much-enduring  and  beneficent 
life  in  the  flourishing  town  of  Providence  in  1684. 
He  had  already  outlived  Cotton  and  Hooker, 
Shepard  and  Winthrop,  by  more  than  thirty  years. 
Inevitably  men  began,  toward  the  end  of  the  cen 
tury,  to  take  stock  of  the  great  venture  of  coloniza 
tion,  to  scrutinize  their  own  history  and  present 
position,  to  ask  searching  questions  of  themselves. 
"You  have  better  food  and  raiment  than  was  in 
former  times,"  wrote  the  aged  Roger  Clark,  in  1676; 
"but  have  you  better  hearts  than  your  forefathers 
had?"  Thomas  Walley's  Languishing  Common 
wealth  maintains  that  "Faith  is  dead,  and  Love  is 
cold,  and  Zeal  is  gone."  Urian  Oakes's  election 
sermon  of  1670  in  Cambridge  is  a  condemnation  of 
the  prevalent  worldliness  and  ostentation.  This 
period  of  critical  inquiry  and  assessment,  however, 
also  gives  grounds  for  just  pride.  History,  bi 
ography,  eulogy,  are  flourishing.  The  reader  is 
reminded  of  that  epoch,  one  hundred  and  fifty 
years  later,  when  the  deaths  of  John  Adams  and 
of  Thomas  Jefferson,  falling  upon  the  same  anni 
versary  day,  the  Fourth  of  July,  1826,  stirred  all 
Americans  to  a  fresh  recognition  of  the  services 
wrought  by  the  Fathers  of  the  Republic.  So  it  was 
in  the  colonies  at  the  close  of  the  seventeenth  cen- 


42     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

tury.  Old  England,  in  one  final  paroxysm  of 
political  disgust,  cast  out  the  last  Stuart  in  1688. 
That  Revolution  marks,  as  we  have  seen,  the  close 
of  a  long  and  tragic  struggle  which  began  in  the 
autocratic  theories  of  James  the  First  and  in  the 
absolutism  of  Charles.  Almost  every  phase  of 
that  momentous  conflict  had  its  reverberation 
across  the  Atlantic,  as  the  history  of  the  granting 
and  withdrawal  of  colonial  charters  witnesses 
abundantly.  The  American  pioneers  were  quite 
aware  of  what  was  going  on  in  England,  and  they 
praised  God  or  grumbled,  thriftily  profited  by  the 
results  or  quietly  nullified  them,  as  the  case  might 
be.  But  all  the  time,  while  England  was  rocked  to 
its  foundations,  the  colonists  struck  steadily  for 
ward  into  their  own  independent  life. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION 

WHEN  the  eighteenth  century  opened,  many  signs 
of  change  were  in  the  air.  The  third  generation 
of  native-born  Americans  was  becoming  secular 
ized.  The  theocracy  of  New  England  had  failed. 
In  the  height  of  the  tragic  folly  over  the  supposed 
"witchcraft"  in  Salem,  Increase  Mather  and  his 
son  Cotton  had  held  up  the  hands  of  the  judges  in 
their  implacable  work.  But  before  five  years  had 
passed,  Judge  Sewall  does  public  penance  in  church 
for  his  share  of  the  awful  blunder,  desiring  "to 
take  the  shame  and  blame  of  it. "  Robert  Calef 's 
cool  pamphlet  exposing  the  weakness  of  the  prose 
cutors'  case  is  indeed  burned  by  Increase  Mather  in 
the  Harvard  Yard,  but  the  liberal  party  are  soon  to 
force  Mather  from  the  Presidency  and  to  refuse 
that  office  to  his  son.  In  the  town  of  Boston,  once 
hermetically  sealed  against  heresy,  there  are 
Baptist  and  Episcopal  churches  —  and  a  dancing- 

43 


44     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

master.  Young  Benjamin  Franklin,  born  in  1706, 
professes  a  high  respect  for  the  Mathers,  but  he 
does  not  go  to  church,  "Sunday  being  my  studying 
day,"  and  neither  the  clerical  nor  the  secular  arm 
of  Boston  is  long  enough  and  strong  enough  to 
compel  that  industrious  apprentice  into  piety. 
If  such  was  the  state  of  New  England,  the  laxity 
of  New  York  and  Virginia  needs  little  evidence. 
Contemporary  travelers  found  the  New  Yorkers 
singularly  attached  to  the  things  of  this  present 
world.  Philadelphia  was  prosperous  and  there 
with  content.  Virginia  was  a  paradise  with  no 
forbidden  fruit.  Hugh  Jones,  writing  of  it  in 
1724,  considers  North  Carolina  "the  refuge  of 
runaways,"  and  South  Carolina  "the  delight  of 
buccaneers  and  pirates,"  but  Virginia  "the  happy 
retreat  of  true  Britons  and  true  Churchmen.'* 
Unluckily  these  Virginians,  well  nourished  "by 
the  plenty  of  the  country,"  have  "contemptible 
notions  of  England!"  We  shall  hear  from  them 
again.  In  the  meantime  the  witty  William  Byrd 
of  Westover  describes  for  us  his  amusing  survey 
of  the  Dismal  Swamp,  and  his  excursions  into 
North  Carolina  and  to  Governor  Spotswood's  iron 
mines,  where  he  reads  aloud  to  the  Widow  Fleming, 
on  a  rainy  autumn  day,  three  acts  of  the  Beggars* 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  45 

Opera,  just  over  from  London.  So  runs  the  world 
away,  south  of'  the  Potomac.  Thackeray  paints 
it  once  for  all,  no  doubt,  in  the  opening  chapters  of 
The  Virginians. 

To  discover  any  ambitious  literary  effort  in  this 
period,  we  must  turn  northward  again.  In  the 
middle  colonies,  and  especially  in  Philadelphia, 
which  had  now  outgrown  Boston  in  population, 
there  was  a  quickened  interest  in  education  and 
science.  But  the  New  Englanders  were  still  the 
chief  makers  of  books.  Three  great  names  will 
sufficiently  represent  the  age:  Cotton  Mather,  a 
prodigy  of  learning  whose  eyes  turn  back  fondly 
to  the  provincial  past ;  Jonathan  Edwards,  perhaps 
the  most  consummate  intellect  of  the  eighteenth 
century;  and  Benjamin  Franklin,  certainly  the 
most  perfect  exponent  of  its  many-sided  life. 

When  Cotton  Mather  was  graduated  from  Har 
vard  in  1678,  in  his  sixteenth  year,  he  was  publicly 
complimented  by  President  Oakes,  in  fulsome 
Latin,  as  the  grandson  of  Richard  Mather  and 
John  Cotton.  This  atmosphere  of  flattery,  this 
consciousness  of  continuing  in  his  own  person  the 
famous  local  dynasty,  surrounded  and  sustained 
him  to  the  end.  He  had  a  less  commanding  per 
sonality  than  his  father  Increase.  His  nervous  sen- 


46     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

sibility  was  excessive.  His  natural  vanity  was  never 
subdued,  though  it  was  often  chastened  by  trial 
and  bitter  disappointment.  But,  like  his  father, 
he  was  an  omnivorous  reader  and  a  facile  producer 
of  books,  carrying  daily  such  burdens  of  mental 
and  spiritual  excitement  as  would  have  crushed  a 
normal  man.  Increase  Mather  published  some 
one  hundred  and  fifty  books  and  pamphlets: 
Cotton  Mather  not  less  than  four  hundred.  The 
Rev.  John  Norton,  in  his  sketch  of  John  Cotton, 
remarks  that  "the  hen,  which  brings  not  forth 
without  uncessant  sitting  night  and  day,  is  an  apt 
emblem  of  students."  Certainly  the  hen  is  an 
apt  emblem  of  the  "uncessant"  sitter,  the  credu 
lous  scratcher,  the  fussy  cackler  who  produced  the 
Magnolia. 

Yet  he  had  certain  elements  of  greatness.  His 
tribal  loyalty  was  perfect.  His  ascetic  devotion 
to  his  conception  of  religious  truth  was  absolute. 
His  Diary,  which  has  recently  been  published  in 
full,  records  his  concern  for  the  chief  political  events 
in  Europe  in  his  day,  no  less  than  his  brooding 
solicitude  for  the  welfare  of  his  townspeople,  and 
his  agony  of  spirit  over  the  lapses  of  his  wayward 
eldest  son.  A  "sincere"  man,  then,  as  Carlyle 
would  say,  at  bottom;  but  overlaid  with  such 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  47 

"Jewish  old  clothes,"  such  professional  robings 
and  personal  plumage  as  makes  it  difficult,  save 
in  the  revealing  Diary,  to  see  the  man  himself. 

The  Magnolia  Christi  Americana,  treating  the 
history  of  New  England  from  1620  to  1698,  was 
published  in  a  tall  London  folio  of  nearly  800 
pages  in  1702.  It  is  divided  into  seven  books, 
and  proceeds,  by  methods  entirely  unique,  to  tell 
of  Pilgrim  and  Puritan  divines  and  governors,  of 
Harvard  College,  of  the  churches  of  New  Eng 
land,  of  marvelous  events,  of  Indian  wars;  and  in 
general  to  justify,  as  only  a  member  of  the  Mather 
dynasty  could  justify,  the  ways  of  God  to  Boston 
men.  Hawthorne  and  Whittier,  Longfellow  and 
Lowell  knew  this  book  well  and  found  much  honey 
in  the  vast  carcass.  To  have  had  four  such 
readers  and  a  biographer  like  Barrett  Wendell 
must  be  gratifying  to  Cotton  Mather  in  Paradise. 

The  Diary  of  Mather's  fellow-townsman  Judge 
Samuel  Sewall  has  been  read  more  generally  in 
recent  years  than  anything  written  by  Mather 
himself.  It  was  begun  in  1673,  nine  years  earlier 
than  the  first  entry  in  Mather's  Diary,  and  it  ends 
in  1729,  while  Mather's  closes  in  1724.  As  a 
picture  of  everyday  happenings  in  New  England, 
Sewall's  Diary  is  as  far  superior  to  Mather's  as 


48     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Pepys's  Diary  is  to  George  Fox's  Journal  in 
painting  the  England  of  the  Restoration.  Samuel 
Sewall  was  an  admirably  solid  figure,  keen,  forceful, 
honest.  Most  readers  of  his  Diary  believe  that  he 
really  was  in  luck  when  he  was  rejected  by  the 
Widow  Winthrop  on  that  fateful  November  day 
when  his  eye  noted  —  in  spite  of  his  infatuation  — 
that  "her  dress  was  not  so  clean  as  sometime  it 
had  been.  Jehovah  Jireh!" 

One  pictures  Cotton  Mather  as  looking  instinc 
tively  backward  to  the  Heroic  Age  of  New  England 
with  pious  nervous  exaltation,  and  Samuel  Sewall 
as  doing  the  day's  work  uprightly  without  taking 
anxious  thought  of  either  past  or  future.  But 
Jonathan  Edwards  is  set  apart  from  these  and 
other  men.  He  is  a  lonely  seeker  after  spiritual 
perfection,  in  quest  of  that  city  "far  on  the  wrorld's 
rim,"  as  Masefield  says  of  it,  the  city  whose 
builder  and  maker  is  God. 

The  story  of  Edwards's  career  has  the  simplicity 
and  dignity,  of  tragedy.  Born  in  a  parsonage  in 
the  quiet  Connecticut  valley  in  1703  —  the  year  of 
John  Wesley's  birth — he  is  writing  at  the  age 
of  ten  to  disprove  the  doctrine  of  the  materiality 
of  the  soul.  At  twelve  he  is  studying  "the 
wondrous  way  of  the  working  of  the  spider,"  with  a 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  49 

precision  and  enthusiasm  which  would  have  made 
him  a  great  naturalist.  At  fourteen  he  begins 
his  notes  on  The  Mind  and  on  Natural  Science. 
He  is  graduated  from  Yale  in  1720,  studies  the 
ology,  and  at  twenty-four  becomes  the  colleague  of 
his  famous  grandfather,  Solomon  Stoddard,  in  the 
church  at  Northampton.  He  marries  the  beauti 
ful  Sarah  Pierrepont,  whom  he  describes  in  his 
journal  in  a  prose  rhapsody  which,  like  his  mysti 
cal  rhapsodies  on  religion  in  the  same  youthful 
period,  glows  with  a  clear  unearthly  beauty 
unmatched  in  any  English  prose  of  that  century. 
For  twenty-three  years  he  serves  the  Northampton 
church,  and  his  sermons  win  him  the  rank  of  the 
foremost  preacher  in  New  England.  John  Wesley 
reads  at  Oxford  his  account  of  the  great  revival  of 
1735.  Whitefield  comes  to  visit  him  at  North 
ampton.  Then,  in  1750,  the  ascetic  preacher 
alienates  his  church  over  issues  pertaining  to  disci 
pline  and  to  the  administration  of  the  sacrament. 
He  is  dismissed.  He  preaches  his  "farewell  ser 
mon,"  like  Wesley,  like  Emerson,  like  Newman, 
and  many  another  still  unborn.  He  removes  to 
Stockbridge,  then  a  hamlet  in  the  wilderness, 
preaches  to  the  Indians,  and  writes  treatises  on 
theology  and  metaphysics,  among  them  the  world- 


50     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

famous  Freedom  of  the  Will.  In  1757,  upon  the 
death  of  his  son-in-law,  President  Aaron  Burr  of 
Princeton,  Edwards  is  called  to  the  vacant  Presi 
dency.  He  is  reluctant  to  go>  for  though  he  is  only 
fifty-four,  his  health  has  never  been  robust,  and  he 
has  his  great  book  on  the  History  of  Redemption 
still  to  write.  But  he  accepts,  finds  the  small 
pox  raging  in  Princeton  upon  his  arrival  in  Janu 
ary,  1758,  is  inoculated,  and  dies  of  the  disease  in 
March  —  his  dreams  unfulfilled,  his  life-work  once 
more  thwarted.  Close  by  the  tomb  of  this  saint  is 
the  tomb  of  his  grandson,  Aaron  Burr,  who  killed 
Hamilton. 

The  literary  reputation  of  Jonathan  Edwards 
has  turned,  like  the  vicissitudes  of  his  life,  upon 
factors  that  could  not  be  foreseen.  His  contem 
porary  fame  was  chiefly  as  a  preacher,  and  was  due 
to  sermons  like  those  upon  God  Glorified  in  Man's 
Dependence  and  The  Reality  of  Spiritual  Life, 
rather  than  to  such  discourses  as  the  Enfield  ser 
mon,  Sinners  in  the  Hands  of  an  Angry  God, 
which  in  our  own  day  is  the  best  known  of  his  deliv 
erances.  Legends  have  grown  up  around  this  ter 
rific  Enfield  sermon.  Its  fearful  power  over  its 
immediate  hearers  cannot  be  gainsaid,  and  it  will 
long  continue  to  be  quoted  as  an  example  of  the 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  51 

length  to  which  a  Calvinistic  logician  of  genius  was 
compelled  by  his  own  scheme  to  go.  We  still  see 
the  tall,  sweet-faced  man,  worn  by  his  daily  twelve 
hours  of  intense  mental  toil,  leaning  on  one  elbow 
in  the  pulpit  and  reading  from  manuscript,  without 
even  raising  his  gentle  voice,  those  words  which 
smote  his  congregation  into  spasms  of  terror  and 
which  seem  to  us  sheer  blasphemy. 

Yet  the  Farewell  Sermon  of  1750  gives  a  more 
characteristic  view  of  Edwards's  mind  and  heart, 
and  conveys  an  ineffaceable  impression  of  his 
nobility  of  soul.  His  diction,  like  Wordsworth's, 
is  usually  plain  almost  to  bareness;  the  formal 
framework  of  his  discourses  is  obtruded;  and  he 
hunts  objections  to  their  last  hiding-place  with 
wearisome  pertinacity.  Yet  his  logic  is  incandes 
cent.  Steel  sometimes  burns  to  the  touch  like 
this,  in  the  bitter  winters  of  New  England,  and  one 
wonders  whether  Edwards's  brain  was  not  of  ice, 
so  pitiless  does  it  seem.  His  treatise  denying  the 
freedom  of  the  will  has  given  him  a  European 
reputation  comparable  with  that  enjoyed  by 
Franklin  in  science  and  Jefferson  in  political 
propaganda.  It  was  really  a  polemic  demon 
strating  the  sovereignty  of  God,  rather  than  pure 
theology  or  metaphysics.  Edwards  goes  beyond 


52     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Augustine  and  Calvin  in  asserting  the  arbitrary 
will  of  the  Most  High  and  in  "denying  to  the 
human  will  any  self -determining  power. "  He  has 
been  refuted  by  events  and  tendencies,  such  as  the 
growth  of  historical  criticism  and  the  widespread 
acceptance  of  the  doctrine  of  evolution,  rather  than 
by  the  might  of  any  single  antagonist.  So,  too, 
the  Dred  Scott  decision  of  Chief  Justice  Taney, 
holding  that  the  slave  was  not  a  citizen,  was  not  so 
much  answered  by  opponents  as  it  was  superseded 
by  the  arbitrament  of  war.  But  the  idealism  of 
this  lonely  thinker  has  entered  deeply  and  perma 
nently  into  the  spiritual  life  of  his  countrymen, 
and  he  will  continue  to  be  read  by  a  few  of  those 
who  still  read  Plato  and  Dante. 

"My  mother  grieves,"  wrote  Benjamin  Franklin 
to  his  father  in  1738,  "that  one  of  her  sons  is  an 
Arian,  another  an  Arminian.  What  an  Arminian 
or  an  Arian  is,  I  cannot  say  that  I  very  well  know. 
The  truth  is  I  make  such  distinctions  very  little 
my  study."  To  understand  Franklin's  indiffer 
ence  to  such  distinctions,  we  must  realize  how  com 
pletely  he  represents  the  secularizing  tendencies 
of  his  age.  What  a  drama  of  worldly  adven 
ture  it  all  was,  this  roving  life  of  the  tallow-chand 
ler's  son,  who  runs  away  from  home,  walks  the 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  53 

streets  of  Philadelphia  with  the  famous  loaves  of 
bread  under  his  arm,  is  diligent  in  business,  slips 
over  to  London,  where  he  gives  lessons  in  swim 
ming  and  in  total  abstinence,  slips  back  to  Phila 
delphia  and  becomes  its  leading  citizen,  fights  the 
long  battle  of  the  American  colonies  in  London, 
sits  in  the  Continental  Congress,  sails  to  Europe 
to  arrange  that  French  Alliance  which  brought  our 
Revolution  to  a  successful  issue,  and  comes  home 
at  last,  full  of  years  and  honors,  to  a  bland  and 
philosophical  exit  from  the  stage! 

He  broke  with  every  Puritan  tradition.  The 
Franklins  were  relatively  late  comers  to  New 
England.  They  sprang  from  a  long  line  of  black 
smiths  at  Ecton  in  Northamptonshire.  The  seat 
of  the  Washingtons  was  not  far  away,  and  Frank 
lin's  latest  biographer  points  out  that  the  pink- 
coated  huntsmen  of  the  Washington  gentry  may 
often  have  stopped  at  Ecton  to  have  their  horses 
shod  at  the  Franklin  smithy.  Benjamin's  father 
came  out  in  1685,  more  than  fifty  years  after  the 
most  notable  Puritan  emigration.  Young  Ben 
jamin,  born  in  1706,  was  as  untouched  by  the 
ardors  of  that  elder  generation  as  he  would  have 
been  by  the  visions  of  Dante  —  an  author,  by  the 
way,  whom  he  never  mentions,  even  as  he  never 


54     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

mentions  Shakespeare.  He  had  no  reverence  for 
Puritan  New  England.  To  its  moral  beauty,  its 
fine  severity,  he  was  wholly  blind.  As  a  boy  he 
thriftily  sold  his  Pilgrim's  Progress.  He  became, 
in  the  new  fashion  of  that  day,  a  Deist.  Like  a 
true  child  of  the  eighteenth  century,  his  attitude 
toward  the  seventeenth  was  that  of  amused  or 
contemptuous  superiority.  Thackeray  has  some 
where  a  charming  phrase  about  his  own  love  for 
the  back  seat  of  the  stage-coach,  the  seat  which, 
in  the  old  coaching  days,  gave  one  a  view  of  the 
receding  landscape.  Thackeray,  like  Burke  before 
him,  loved  historical  associations,  historical  senti 
ment,  the  backward  look  over  the  long  road  which 
humanity  has  traveled.  But  Franklin  faced  the 
other  way.  He  would  have  endorsed  his  friend 
Jefferson's  scornful  sentence,  "The  dead  have 
no  rights."  He  joined  himself  wholly  to  that 
eighteenth  century  in  which  his  own  lot  was  cast, 
and,  alike  in  his  qualities  and  in  his  defects,  he 
became  one  of  its  most  perfect  representatives. 
To  catch  the  full  spirit  of  that  age,  turn  for 
an  instant  to  the  London  of  1724  —  the  year  of 
Franklin's  arrival.  Thirty-six  years  have  elapsed 
since  the  glorious  Revolution  of  1688;  the  Whig 
principles,  then  triumphant,  have  been  tacitly 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  55 

accepted  by  both  political  parties;  the  Jacobite 
revolt  of  1715  has  proved  a  fiasco;  the  country  has 
accepted  the  House  of  Hanover  and  a  government 
by  party  leadership  of  the  House  of  Gommons, 
and  it  does  not  care  whether  Sir  Robert  Walpole 
buys  a  few  rotten  boroughs,  so  long  as  he  maintains 
peace  with  Europe  and  prosperity  at  home. 
England  is  weary  of  seventeenth  century  "  enthusi 
asm,"  weary  of  conflict,  sick  of  idealism.  She 
has  found  in  the  accepted  Whig  principles  a  satis 
factory  compromise,  a  working  theory  of  society, 
a  modus  vivendi  which  nobody  supposes  is  perfect 
but  which  will  answer  the  prayer  appointed  to  be 
read  in  all  the  churches,  "Grant  us  peace  in  our 
time,  O  Lord. "  The  theories  to  which  men  gave 
their  lives  in  the  seventeenth  century  seem  ghostly 
in  their  unreality;  but  the  prize  turnips  on  Sir 
Robert's  Norfolk  farm,  and  the  wines  in  his  cellar, 
and  the  offices  at  his  disposal  —  these  are  very  real 
indeed.  London  merchants  are  making  money;  the 
squire  and  the  parson  are  tranquilly  ruling  the  coun 
try  parishes;  the  philosophy  of  John  Locke  is  every 
where  triumphant.  Mr.  Pope  is  the  poet  of  the  hour, 
and  his  Essay  on  Man,  counseling  acceptance  of  our 
mortal  situation,  is  considered  to  be  the  last  word 
of  human  wisdom  and  of  poetical  elegance.  In 


56     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

prose,  the  style  of  the  Spectator  rules  —  an  admir 
able  style,  Franklin  thought,  and  he  imitated  it  pa 
tiently  until  its  ease  and  urbanity  had  become  his 
own.  And  indeed,  how  much  of  that  London  of 
the  third  decade  of  the  century  passed  into  the 
mind  of  the  inquisitive,  roving,  loose-living  print 
er's  apprentice  from  Philadelphia!  It  taught 
him  that  the  tangible  world  is  the  real  world, 
and  that  nothing  succeeds  like  success;  but  it 
never  even  whispered  to  him  that  sometimes 
nothing  damns  like  success. 

In  his  limitations,  no  less  than  in  his  powrer  of 
assimilation,  Franklin  was  the  representative  man 
of  his  era.  He  had  no  artistic  interests,  no  liking 
for  metaphysics  after  his  brief  devotion,  in  early 
manhood,  to  the  dialogues  of  Plato.  He  taught 
himself  some  Latin,  but  he  came  to  believe  that 
the  classics  had  little  significance  and  that  they 
should  be  superseded  by  the  modern  languages. 
For  the  mediaeval  world  he  had  no  patience  or 
understanding.  To  these  defects  of  his  century 
we  must  add  some  failings  of  his  owrn.  He  was 
not  always  truthful.  He  had  an  indelible  streak 
of  coarseness.  His  conception  of  the  "art  of 
virtue"  was  mechanical.  When  Carlyle  called 
Franklin  the  "father  of  all  the  Yankees,"  we  must 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  57 

remember  that  the  Scotch  prophet  hated  Yankees 
and  believed  that  Franklin's  smooth,  plausible, 
trader  type  of  morality  was  only  a  broad  way  to 
the  everlasting  bonfire. 

But  it  is  folly  to  linger  over  the  limitations  of 
the  tallow-chandler's  son.  The  catalogue  of  his 
beneficent  activity  is  a  vast  one.  Balzac  once 
characterized  him  as  the  man  who  invented  the 
lightning-rod,  the  hoax,  and  the  republic.  His 
contributions  to  science  have  to  do  with  electric 
ity,  earthquakes,  geology,  meteorology,  physics, 
chemistry,  astronomy,  mathematics,  navigation  of 
air  and  water,  agriculture,  medicine,  and  hygiene. 
In  some  of  these  fields  he  did  pioneer  work  of 
lasting  significance.  His  teachings  of  thrift  and 
prudence,  as  formulated  in  the  maxims  of  Poor 
Richard,  gave  him  a  world-wide  reputation.  He 
attacked  war,  like  Voltaire,  not  so  much  for  its 
wickedness  as  for  its  folly,  and  cheerfully  gave 
up  many  years  of  a  long  life  to  the  effort  to  promote 
a  better  understanding  among  the  nations  of  the 
world. 

It  is  perhaps  needless  to  add  what  all  persons 
who  love  good  writing  know,  that  Benjamin  Frank 
lin  was  a  most  delightful  writer.  His  letters 
cover  an  amusing  and  extraordinary  variety  of 


58     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

topics.  He  ranges  from  balloons  to  summer  hats, 
and  from  the  advantages  of  deep  ploughing  to  bi 
focal  glasses,  which,  by  the  way,  he  invented.  He 
argues  for  sharp  razors  and  cold  baths,  and  for 
fresh  air  in  the  sleeping-room.  He  discusses  the 
morals  of  the  game  of  chess,  the  art  of  swimming, 
the  evils  of  smoky  chimneys,  the  need  of  reformed 
spelling.  Indeed,  his  passion  for  improvement  led 
him  not  only  to  try  his  hand  upon  an  abridgment 
of  the  Book  of  Common  Prayer,  but  to  go  even  so 
far  as  to  propose  seriously  a  new  rendering  of  the 
Lord's  Prayer.  His  famous  proposal  for  a  new 
version  of  the  Bible,  however,  which  Matthew 
Arnold  solemnly  held  up  to  reprobation,  was  only 
a  joke  which  Matthew  Arnold  did  not  see  —  the 
new  version  of  Job  being,  in  fact,  a  clever  bit  of 
political  satire  against  party  leadership  in  England. 
Even  more  brilliant  examples  of  his  skill  in  political 
satire  are  his  imaginary  Edict  of  the  King  of 
Prussia  against  England,  and  his  famous  Rules 
for  Reducing  a  Great  Empire  to  a  Small  One.  But 
I  must  not  try  to  call  the  roll  of  all  the  good  things 
in  Franklin's  ten  volumes.  I  will  simply  say  that 
those  who  know  Franklin  only  in  his  Autobi 
ography,  charming  as  that  classic  production  is, 
have  made  but  an  imperfect  acquaintance  with 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  59 

the  range,  the  vitality,  the  vigor  of  this  admirable 
craftsman  who  chose  a  style  "smooth,  clear,  and 
short,"  and  made  it  serve  every  purpose  of  his 
versatile  and  beneficent  mind. 

When  the  passage  of  the  Stamp  Act  in  1765 
startled  the  American  colonies  out  of  their  provin 
cial  sense  of  security  and  made  them  aware  of  their 
real  attitude  toward  the  mother  country,  Franklin 
was  in  London.  Eleven  years  earlier,  in  1754, 
he  had  offered  a  plan  for  the  Union  of  the  Colonies, 
but  this  had  not  contemplated  separation  from 
England.  It  was  rather  what  we  should  call  a 
scheme  for  imperial  federation  under  the  British 
Crown.  We  may  use  his  word  union,  however, 
in  a  different  field  from  that  of  politics.  How 
much  union  of  sentiment,  of  mental  and  moral 
life,  of  literary,  educational,  and  scientific  endeavor, 
was  there  in  the  colonies  when  the  hour  of  self- 
examination  came?  Only  the  briefest  summary 
may  be  attempted  here. 

As  to  race,  these  men  of  the  third  and  fourth 
generation  since  the  planting  of  the  colonies  were 
by  no  means  so  purely  English  as  the  first  settlers. 
The  1,600,000  colonists  in  1760  were  mingled  of 
many  stocks,  the  largest  non-English  elements 
being  German  and  Scotch-Irish  —  that  is,  Scotch 


60     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

who  had  settled  for  a  while  in  Ulster  before 
emigrating  to  America.  "About  one-third  of  the 
colonists  in  1760,"  says  Professor  Channing, 
"were  born  outside  of  America."  Crevecceur's 
Letters  from  an  American  Farmer  thus  defined  the 
Americans:  "They  are  a  mixture  of  English, 
Scotch,  Irish,  French,  Dutch,  Germans,  and 
Swedes.  From  this  promiscuous  breed  that  race 
now  called  Americans  has  arisen."  The  Atlantic 
seaboard,  with  a  narrow  strip  inland,  was  fairly 
well  covered  by  local  communities,  differing  in 
blood,  in  religion,  in  political  organization  — 
"a  congeries  of  separate  experiments"  or  young 
Utopias,  waiting  for  that  most  Utopian  experi 
ment  of  all,  a  federal  union.  But  the  dominant 
language  of  the  "promiscuous  breed"  was  English, 
and  in  the  few  real  centers  of  intellectual  life  the 
English  tradition  was  almost  absolute. 

The  merest  glance  at  colonial  journalism  will 
confirm  this  estimate.  The  Boston  News-Letter, 
begun  in  1704,  was  the  first  of  the  journals,  if  we 
omit  the  single  issue  of  Publick  Occurrences  in 
the  same  town  in  1690.  By  1765  there  were 
nearly  fifty  colonial  newspapers  and  several  maga 
zines.  Their  influence  made  for  union,  in  Frank 
lin's  sense  of  that  word,  and  their  literary  models, 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  61 

like  their  paper,  type,  and  even  ink,  were  found 
in  London.  The  New  England  Courant,  estab 
lished  in  Boston  in  1721  by  James  Franklin,  is 
full  of  imitations  of  the  Taller,  Spectator,  and 
Guardian.  What  is  more,  the  Courant  boasted  of 
its  office  collection  of  books,  including  Shakespeare, 
Milton,  the  Spectator,  and  Swift's  Tale  of  a  Tub.1 
This  was  in  1722.  If  we  remember  that  no  allu 
sion  to  Shakespeare  has  been  discovered  in  the 
colonial  literature  -  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
and  scarcely  an  allusion  to  the  Puritan  poet  Milton, 
and  that  the  Harvard  College  Library  in  1723 
had  nothing  of  Addison,  Steele,  Bolingbroke, 
Dryden,  Pope,  and  Swift,  and  had  only  recently 
obtained  copies  of  Milton  and  Shakespeare,  we 
can  appreciate  the  value  of  James  Franklin's 
apprenticeship  in  London.  Perhaps  we  can  even 
forgive  him  for  that  attack  upon  the  Mathers 
which  threw  the  conduct  of  the  Courant,  for  a  brief 
period,  into  the  hands  of  his  brother  Benjamin, 
whose  turn  at  a  London  apprenticeship  was  soon 
to  come. 

If   we   follow   this   younger   brother   to   Phila 
delphia  and  to  Bradford's  American  Mercury  or 

1  Cook,  E.  C.     Literary  Influences  in  Colonial  Newspapers,  1704- 
1750.     N.  Y.,  1912. 


62     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

to  Franklin's  own  Pennsylvania  Gazette,  or  if  we 
study  the  Gazettes  of  Maryland,  Virginia,  and 
South  Carolina,  the  impression  is  still  the  same. 
The  literary  news  is  still  chiefly  from  London,  from 
two  months  to  a  year  late.  London  books  are 
imported  and  reprinted.  Franklin  reprints  Pa 
mela,  and  his  Library  Company  of  Philadelphia  has 
two  copies  of  Paradise  Lost  for  circulation  in  1741, 
whereas  there  had  been  no  copy  of  that  work  in  the 
great  library  of  Cotton  Mather.  American  jour 
nalism  then,  as  now,  owed  its  vitality  to  a  secular 
spirit  of  curiosity  about  the  actual  world.  It 
followed  England  as  its  model,  but  it  was  beginning 
to  develop  a  temper  of  its  own. 

Colonial  education  and  colonial  science  were 
likewise  chiefly  indebted  to  London,  but  by  1751 
Franklin's  papers  on  electricity  began  to  repay 
the  loan.  A  university  club  in  New  York  in  1745 
could  have  had  but  fifteen  members  at  most,  for 
these  were  all  the  "academics"  in  town.  Yet 
Harvard  had  then  been  sending  forth  her  gradu 
ates  for  more  than  a  century.  William  and  Mary 
was  founded  in  1693,  Yale  in  1701,  Princeton  in 
1746,  King's  (now  Columbia)  in  1754,  the  Uni 
versity  of  Pennsylvania  in  1755,  and  Brown 
in  1764.  These  colonial  colleges  were  mainly 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  63 

in  the  hands  of  clergymen.  They  tended  to 
reproduce  £,  type  of  scholarship  based  upon 
the  ancient  languages.  The  curriculum  varied 
but  little  in  the  different  colonies,  and  this  fact 
helped  to  produce  a  feeling  of  fellowship  among 
all  members  of  the  republic  of  letters.  The  men 
who  debated  the  Stamp  Act  were,  with  a  few 
striking  exceptions,  men  trained  in  Latin  and 
Greek,  familiar  with  the  great  outlines  of  human 
history,  accustomed  to  the  discipline  of  academic 
disputation.  They  knew  the  ideas  and  the 
vocabulary  of  cultivated  Europe  and  were  con 
scious  of  no  provincial  inferiority.  In  the  study 
of  the  physical  sciences,  likewise,  the  colonials 
were  but  little  behind  the  mother  country.  The 
Royal  Society  had  its  distinguished  members  here. 
The  Mathers,  the  Dudleys,  John  Winthrop  of  Con 
necticut,  John  Bartram,  James  Logan,  James  God 
frey,  Cadwallader  Golden,  and  above  all,  Franklin 
himself,  were  winning  the  respect  of  European 
students,  and  were  teaching  Americans  to  use  their 
eyes  and  their  minds  not  merely  upon  the  records 
of  the  past  but  in  searching  out  the  inexhaustible 
meanings  ot  the  present.  There  is  no  more 
fascinating  story  than  that  of  the  beginnings  of 
American  science  in  and  outside  of  the  colleges, 


64     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

$  and  this  movement,  like  the  influence  of  journalism 
I  and  of  the  higher  education,  counted  for  colonial 
-  union. 

Professor  Tyler,  our  foremost  literary  student 

^  of  the  period,  summarizes  the  characteristics  of 
colonial  literature  in  these  words:  "Before  the 
year  1765,  we  find  in  this  country,  not  one  Ameri 
can  people,  but  many  American  peoples.  .  .  .  No 
cohesive  principle  prevailed,  no  centralizing  life; 
each  little  nation  was  working  out  its  own  destiny 
in  its  own  fashion."  But  he  adds  that  with  that 
year  the  colonial  isolation  came  to  an  end,  and 
that  the  student  must  thereafter  "deal  with 
the  literature  of  one  multitudinous  people,  varie 
gated,  indeed,  in  personal  traits,  but  single  in  its 

^commanding  ideas  and  in  its  national  destinies." 
jit  is  easy  to  be  wise  after  the  event.  Yet  there 
was  living  in  London  in  1765,  as  the  agent  for 
Pennsylvania,  a  shrewd  and  bland  Colonial  —  an 
honorary  M.A.  from  both  Harvard  and  Yale,  a 
D.C.L.  of  Oxford  and  an  LL.D.  of  St.  Andrews  - 
who  was  by  no  means  sure  that  the  Stamp  Act 
meant  the  end  of  Colonialism.  And  Franklin's 
uncertainty  was  shared  by  Washington.  When 
the  tall  Virginian  took  command  of  the  Conti 
nental  Army  as  late  as  1775,  he  '' abhorred  the  idea 


THE  THIRD  AND  FOURTH  GENERATION  65 

of  independence."  Nevertheless  John  Jay,  writ 
ing  the  second  number  of  the  Federalist  in  1787, 
only  twelve  years  later,  could  say:  "Providence 
has  been  pleased  to  give  this  one  connected 
country  to  one  united  people;  a  people  descended 
from  the  same  ancestors,  speaking  the  same  lan 
guage,  professing  the  same  religion,  attached  to 
the  same  principles  of  government. " 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE     REVOLUTION 

IF  we  turn,  however,  to  the  literature  produced  in 
America  between  the  passage  of  the  Stamp  Act  in 
1765  and  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution  in  1787, 
we  perceive  that  it  is  a  literature  of  discord  and 
passion.  Its  spirit  is  not  that  of  "one  united 
people. "  Washington  could  indeed  declare  in  his 
Farewell  Address  of  1796,  "With  slight  shades  of 
difference,  you  have  the  same  religion,  manners, 
habits,  and  political  principles";  yet  no  one 
knew  better  than  Washington  upon  what  a  slen 
der  thread  this  political  imity  had  often  hung, 
and  how  impossible  it  had  been  to  foresee  the  end 
from  the  beginning. 

It  is  idle  to  look  in  the  writings  of  the  Revolu 
tionary  period  for  the  literature  of  beauty,  for  a 
quiet  harmonious  unfolding  of  the  deeper  secrets 
of  life.  It  was  a  time  of  swift  and  pitiless  change, 
of  action  rather  than  reflection,  of  the  turning 


THE  REVOLUTION  67 

of  many  separate  currents  into  one  headlong 
stream.  "We  must,  indeed,  all  hang  together," 
runs  Franklin's  well-known  witticism  in  Independ 
ence  Hall,  "or,  most  assuredly,  we  shall  all  hang 
separately."  Excellently  spoken,  Doctor!  And 
that  Ipflnely,  cheery,  daring  sentence  gives  the  key 
note  of  much  of  the  Revolutionary  writing  that 
has  survived.  It  may  be  heard  in  the  state  papers 
of  Samuel  Adams,  the  oratory  of  Patrick  Henry,  the 
pamphlets  of  Thomas  Paine,  the  satires  of  Fre- 
neau  and  Trumbull,  and  in  the  subtle,  insinuating, 
thrilling  paragraphs  of  Thomas  Jefferson. 

We  can  only  glance  in  passing  at  the  literature  of 
the  Lost  Cause,  the  Loyalist  or  "Tory"  pleadings 
for  allegiance  to  Britain.  It  was  written  by  able 
and  honest  men,  like  Boucher  and  Odell,  Seabury, 
Leonard  and  Galloway.  They  distrusted  what 
Seabury  called  "our  sovereign  Lord  the  Mob." 
They  represented,  in  John  Adams's  opinion, 
nearly  one-third  of  the  people  of  the  colonies,  and 
recent  students  believe  that  this  estimate  was 
too  low.  In  some  colonies  the  Loyalists  were 
clearly  in  the  majority.  In  all  they  were  a  menac 
ing  element,  made  up  of  the  conservative,  the 
prosperous,  the  well-educated,  with  a  mixture,  of 
course,  of  mere  placemen  and  tuft-hunters.  They 


68     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

composed  weighty  pamphlets,  eloquent  sermons, 
and  sparkling  satire  in  praise  of  the  old  order  of 
things.  When  their  cause  was  lost  forever,  they 
wrote  gossipy  letters  from  their  exile  in  London 
or  pathetic  verses  in  their  new  home  in  Nova 
Scotia  and  Ontario.  Their  place  in  our  national 
life  and  literature  has  never  been  filled,  and  their 
talents  and  virtues  are  never  likely  to  receive  ade 
quate  recognition.  They  took  the  wrong  fork  of 
the  road. 

There  were  gentle  spirits,  too,  in  this  period, 
endowed  with  delicate  literary  gifts,  but  quite 
unsuited  for  the  clash  of  controversy  —  members, 
in  Crevecceur's  touching  words,  of  the  "  secret  com 
munion  among  good  men  throughout  the  world." 
"I  am  a  lover  of  peace,  what  must  I  do?"  asks 
Crevecceur  in  his  Letters  from  an  American  Farmer. 
"I  was  happy  before  this  unfortunate  Revolution. 
I  feel  that  I  am  no  longer  so,  therefore  I  regret  the 
change.  My  heart  sometimes  seems  tired  with 
beating,  it  wants  rest  like  my  eyelids,  which  feel  op 
pressed  with  so  many  watchings."  Crevecceur,  an 
immigrant  from  Normandy,  was  certainly  no  weak 
ling,  but  he  felt  that  the  great  idyllic  American 
adventure  —  which  he  described  so  captivatingly 
in  his  chapter  entitled  What  is  an  American  —  was 


THE  REVOLUTION  69 

ending  tragically  in  civil  war.  Another  white- 
souled  itinerant  of  that  day  was  John  Woolman  of 
New  Jersey,  whose  Journal,  praised  by  Charles 
Lamb  and  Channing  and  edited  by  Whittier,  is 
finding  more  readers  in  the  twentieth  century  than 
it  won  in  the  nineteenth.  "A  man  unlettered," 
said  Whittier,  "but  with  natural  refinement  and 
delicate  sense  of  fitness,  the  purity  of  whose  heart 
enters  into  his  language."  Woolman  died  at 
fifty-two  in  far-away  York,  England,  whither  he 
had  gone  to  attend  a  meeting  of  the  Society  of 
Friends. 

The  three  tall  volumes  of  the  Princeton  edition 
of  the  poems  of  Philip  Freneau  bear  the  sub-title, 
"Poet  of  the  American  Revolution."  But  our 
Revolution,  in  truth,  never  had  an  adequate  poet. 
The  prose-men,  such  as  Jefferson,  rose  nearer  the 
height  of  the  great  argument  than  did  the  men  of 
rhyme.  Here  and  there  the  struggle  inspired  a 
brisk  ballad  like  Francis  Hopkinson's  Battle  of  the 
Kegs,  a  Hudibrastic  satire  like  Trumbull's  McFin- 
gal,  or  a  patriotic  song  like  Timothy  Dwight's 
Columbia.  Freneau  painted  from  his  own  experi 
ence  the  horrors  of  the  British  prison-ship,  and 
celebrated,  in  cadences  learned  from  Gray  and 
Collins,  the  valor  of  the  men  who  fell  at  Eutaw 


70     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Springs.  There  was  patriotic  verse  in  extraordin 
ary  profusion,  but  its  literary  value  is  slight,  and 
it  reveals  few  moods  of  the  American  mind  that 
are  not  more  perfectly  conveyed  through  oratory, 
the  pamphlet,  and  the  political  essay.  The  im 
mediate  models  of  this  Revolutionary  veroe  were 
the  minor  British  bards  of  the  eighteenth  cen 
tury,  a  century  greatly  given  to  verse-writing, 
but  endowed  by  Heaven  with  the  "prose-reason" 
mainly.  The  reader  of  Burton  E.  Stevenson's 
collection  of  Poems  of  American  History  can  easily 
compare  the  contemporary  verse  inspired  by  the 
events  of  the  Revolution  with  the  modern  verse 
upon  the  same  historic  themes.  He  will  see  how 
slenderly  equipped  for  song  were  most  of  the  later 
eighteenth-century  Americans  and  how  unfavor 
able  to  poetry  was  the  tone  of  that  hour. 

Freneau  himself  suffered,  throughout  his  long 
career,  from  the  depressing  indifference  of  his 
public  to  the  true  spirit  of  poetry.  "An  old 
college  mate  of  mine,"  said  James  Madison  —  who 
was  by  tradition  Freneau's  room-mate  at  Prince 
ton  in  the  class  of  1771  —  "a  poet  and  man  of 
literary  and  refined  tastes,  knowing  nothing  of  the 
world."  When  but  three  years  out  of  college, 
the  cautious  Madison  wrote  to  another  friend: 


THE  REVOLUTION  71 

"Poetry  wit  and  Criticism  Romances  Plays  &c 
captivated  me  much:  but  I  begin  to  discover 
that  they  deserve  but  a  moderate  portion  of 
a  mortal's  Time  and  that  something  more  sub 
stantial  more  durable  more  profitable  befits 
our  riper  age."  Madison  was  then  at  the  ripe 
age  of  twenty -three!  Professor  Pattee,  Fre- 
neau's  editor,  quotes  these  words  to  illustrate  the 
"common  sense"  atmosphere  of  the  age  which 
proved  fatal  to  Freneau's  development.  Yet 
the  sturdy  young  New  Yorker,  of  Huguenot  de 
scent,  is  a  charming  figure,  and  his  later  malevo 
lence  was  shown  only  to  his  political  foes.  After 
leaving  Princeton  he  tries  teaching,  the  law,  the 
newspaper,  the  sea;  he  is  aflame  with  patriotic 
zeal;  he  writes,  like  most  American  poets,  far 
too  much  for  his  own  reputation.  As  the  editor  of 
the  National  Gazette  in  Philadelphia,  he  becomes 
involved  in  the  bitter  quarrel  between  his  chief, 
Jefferson,  and  Alexander  Hamilton.  His  attach 
ment  to  the  cause  of  the  French  Revolution  makes 
him  publish  baseless  attacks  upon  Washington. 
By  and  by  he  retires  to  a  New  Jersey  farm,  still 
toying  with  journalism,  still  composing  verses. 
He  turns  patriotic  poet  once  more  in  the  War  of 
1812;  but  the  public  has  now  forgotten  him. 


72     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

He  lives  on  in  poverty  and  seclusion,  and  in  his 
eightieth  year  loses  his  way  in  a  snowstorm  and 
perishes  miserably  —  this  in  1832,  the  year  of  the 
death  of  the  great  Sir  Walter  Scott,  who  once  had 
complimented  Freneau  by  borrowing  one  of  his 
best  lines  of  poetry. 

It  is  in  the  orations  and  pamphlets  and  state- 
papers  inspired  by  the  Revolutionary  agitation 
that  we  find  the  most  satisfactory  expression  of 
the  thought  and  feeling  of  that  generation.  Its 
typical  literature  is  civic  rather  than  aesthetic,  a 
sort  of  writing  which  has  been  incidental  to  the 
accomplishing  of  some  political,  social,  or  moral 
purpose,  and  which  scarcely  regards  itself  as 
literature  at  all.  James  Otis's  argument  against 
the  Writs  of  Assistance  in  Massachusetts  in  1761, 
and  Patrick  Henry's  speech  in  the  Virginia  House 
of  Burgesses  in  1765,  mark  epochs  in  the  emotional 
life  of  these  communities.  They  were  reported 
imperfectly  or  not  at  all,  but  they  can  no  more  be 
ignored  in  an  assessment  of  our  national  experience 
than  editorials,  sermons,  or  conversations  which 
have  expressed  the  deepest  feelings  of  a  day  and 
then  have  perished  beyond  resurrection. 

Yet  if  natural  orators  like  Otis  and  Henry  be 
denied  a  strictly  "literary"  rating  because  their 


THE  REVOLUTION  73 

surviving  words  are  obviously  inadequate  to 
account  for  the  popular  effect  of  their  speeches,  it 
is  still  possible  to  measure  the  efficiency  of  the 
pamphleteer.  When  John  Adams  tells  us  that 
"James  Otis  was  Isaiah  and  Ezekiel  united,"  we 
must  take  his  word  for  the  impression  which  Otis's 
oratory  left  upon  his  mind.  But  John  Adams's 
own  writings  fill  ten  stout  volumes  which  invite 
our  judgment.  The v  "  truculent  and  sarcastic 
splendor"  of  his  hyperboles  need  not  blind  us  to  his 
real  literary  excellencies,  such  as  clearness,  candor, 
vigor  of  phrase,  freshness  of  idea.  A  testy,  rugged, 
"difficult"  person  was  John  Adams,  but  he  grew 
mellower  with  age,  and  his  latest  letters  and 
journals  are  full  of  whimsical  charm. 

John  Adams's  cousin  Samuel  was  not  precisely  a 
charming  person.  Bigoted,  tireless,  secretive,  this 
cunning  manipulator  of  political  passions  followed 
many  tortuous  paths.  His  ability  for  adroit 
misstatement  of  an  adversary's  position  has  been 
equaled  but  once  in  our  history.  But  to  the 
casual  reader  of  his  four  volumes,  Samuel  Adams 
seems  ever  to  be  breathing  the  liberal  air  of  the 
town-meeting:  everything  is  as  plainly  obvious  as 
a  good  citizen  can  make  it.  He  has,  too,  the  large 
utterance  of  the  European  liberalism  of  his  day. 


74     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

"Resolved,"  read  his  Resolutions  of  the  House  of 
Representatives  of  Massachusetts  in  1765,  "that 
there  are  certain  essential  rights  of  the  British 
constitution  of  government  which  are  founded  in 
the  law  of  God  and  nature  and  are  the  common 
rights  of  mankind."  In  his  statement  of  the 
Rights  of  the  Colonists  (1772)  we  are  assured  that 
"among  the  natural  rights  of  the  colonists  are 
these,  First,  a  right  to  Life;  secondly  to  Liberty; 
thirdly  to  Property.  ...  All  men  have  a  Right  to 
remain  in  a  State  of  Nature  as  long  as  they  please. 
.  .  .  When  Men  enter  into  Society,  it  is  by  volun 
tary  consent. "  Jean- Jacques  himself  could  not  be 
more  bland,  nor  at  heart  more  fiercely  demagogic. 
"Tom"  Paine  would  have  been  no  match  for 
"Sam"  Adams  in  a  town-meeting,  but  he  was  an 
even  greater  pamphleteer.  He  had  arrived  from 
England  in  1774,  at  the  age  of  thirty-eight,  having 
hitherto  failed  in  most  of  his  endeavors  for  a  liveli 
hood.  "Rebellious  Staymaker;  unkempt,"  says 
Carlyle;  but  General  Charles  Lee  noted  that  there 
was  "genius  in  his  eyes,"  and  he  bore  a  letter  of 
introduction  from  Franklin  commending  him  as  an 
"ingenious,  worthy  young  man,"  which  obtained 
for  him  a  position  on  the  Pennsylvania  Magazine. 
Before  he  had  been  a  year  on  American  soil,  Paine 


THE  REVOLUTION  75 

was  writing  the  most  famous  pamphlet  of  our 
political  literature,  Common  Sense,  which  appeared 
in  January,  1776.  "A  style  hitherto  unknown  on 
this  side  of  the  Atlantic,"  wrote  Edmund  Ran 
dolph.  Yet  this  style  of  familiar  talk  to  the  crowd 
had  been  used  seventy  years  earlier  by  Defoe  and 
Swift,  and  it  was  to  be  employed  again  by  a  gaunt 
American  frontiersman  who  was  born  in  1809,  the 
year  of  Thomas  Paine' s  death.  The  Crisis,  a 
series  of  thirteen  pamphlets,  of  which  the  first  was 
issued  in  December,  1776,  seemed  to  justify  the 
contemporary  opinion  that  the  "American  cause 
owed  as  much  to  the  pen  of  Paine  as  to  the  sword 
of  Washington. "  Paine,  who  was  now  serving  in 
the  army,  might  have  heard  his  own  words,  "These 
are  the  times  that  try  men's  souls,"  read  aloud, 
by  Washington's  orders,  to  the  ragged  troops  just 
before  they  crossed  the  Delaware  to  win  the  vic 
tory  of  Trenton.  The  best  known  productions  of 
Paine's  subsequent  career,  The  Rights  of  Man  and 
The  Age  of  Reason,  were  written  in  Europe,  but 
they  were  read  throughout  America.  The  repu 
tation  of  the  "rebellious  Stay  maker"  has  suffered 
from  certain  grimy  habits  and  from  the  ridiculous 
charge  of  atheism.  He  was  no  more  an  atheist 
than  Franklin  or  Jefferson.  In  no  sense  an  original 


76     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

thinker,  he  could  impart  to  outworn  shreds  of 
deistic  controversy  and  to  shallow  generalizations 
about  democracy  a  personal  fervor  which  trans 
formed  them  and  made  his  pages  gay  and  bold  and 
clear  as  a  trumpet. 

Clear  and  bold  and  gay  was  Alexander  Hamilton 
likewise;  and  his  literary  services  to  the  Revolu 
tion  are  less  likely  to  be  underestimated  than 
Thomas  Paine's.  They  began  with  that  boyish 
speech  in  "the  Fields"  of  New  York  City  in  1774 
and  with  The  Farmer  Refuted,  a  reply  to  Samuel 
Seabury's  Westchester  Farmer.  They  were  con 
tinued  in  extraordinary  letters,  written  during 
Hamilton's  military  career,  upon  the  defects  of  the 
Articles  of  Confederation  and  of  the  finances  of  the 
Confederation.  Hamilton  contributed  but  little 
to  the  actual  structure  of  the  new  Constitution, 
but  as  a  debater  he  fought  magnificently  and 
triumphantly  for  its  adoption  by  the  Convention 
of  the  State  of  New  York  in  1788.  Together  with 
Jay  and  Madison  he  defended  the  fundamental 
principles  of  the  Federal  Union  in  the  remarkable 
series  of  papers  known  as  the  Federalist.  These 
eighty-five  papers,  appearing  over  the  signature 
"Publius"  in  two  New  York  newspapers  between 
October,  1787,  and  April,  1788,  owed  their  con- 


THE  REVOLUTION  77 

ception  largely  to  Hamilton,  who  wrote  more  than 
half  of  them  himself.  In  manner  they  are  not 
unlike  the  substantial  Whig  literature  of  England, 
and  in  political  theory  they  have  little  in  common 
with  the  Revolutionary  literature  which  we  have 
been  considering.  The  reasoning  is  close,  the  style 
vigorous  but  neither  warmed  by  passion  nor 
colored  by  the  individual  emotions  of  the  author. 
The  Federalist  remains  a  classic  example  of  the 
civic  quality  of  our  post-Revolutionary  American 
political  writing,  broadly  social  in  its  outlook,  well 
informed  as  to  the  past,  confident  —  but  not  reck 
less  —  of  the  future.  Many  Americans  still  read 
it  who  would  be  shocked  by  Tom  Paine  and 
bored  with  Edmund  Burke.  It  has  none  of  the 
literary  genius  of  either  of  those  writers,  but 
its  formative  influence  upon  successive  genera 
tions  of  political  thinking  has  been  steadying  and 
sound. 

In  fact,  our  citizen  literature  cannot  be  under 
stood  aright  if  one  fails  to  observe  that  its  effect 
has  often  turned,  not  upon  mere  verbal  skill,  but 
upon  the  weight  of  character  behind  the  words. 
Thus  the  grave  and  reserved  George  Washington 
says  of  the  Constitution  of  1787:  "Let  us  raise  a 
standard  to  which  the  wise  and  the  honest  can 


78     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

repair;  the  event  is  in  the  hand  of  God."  The 
whole  personality  of  the  great  Virginian  is  back  of 
that  simple,  perfect  sentence.  It  brings  us  to  our 
feet,  like  a  national  anthem. 

One  American,  no  doubt  our  most  gifted  man  of 
letters  of  that  century,  passed  most  of  the  Revolu 
tionary  period  abroad,  in  the  service  of  his  country. 
Benjamin  Franklin  was  fifty-nine  in  the  year  of  the 
Stamp  Act.  When  he  returned  from  France  in 
1785  he  was  seventy-nine,  but  he  was  still  writing 
as  admirably  as  ever  when  he  died  at  eighty -four. 
We  cannot  dismiss  this  singular,  varied,  and  fas 
cinating  American  better  than  by  quoting  the 
letter  which  George  Washington  wrote  to  him  in 
September,  1789.  It  has  the  dignity  and  formality 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  but  it  is  warm  with 
tested  friendship  and  it  glows  with  deep  human 
feeling:  "If  to  be  venerated  for  benevolence,  if  to  be 
admired  for  talents,  if  to  be  esteemed  for  patriot 
ism,  if  to  be  beloved  for  philanthropy,  can  gratify 
the  human  mind,  you  must  have  the  pleasing  con 
solation  to  know  that  you  have  not  lived  in  vain. 
And  I  flatter  myself  that  it  will  not  be  ranked 
among  the  least  grateful  occurrences  of  your  life 
to  be  assured,  that,  so  long  as  I  retain  my  memory, 
you  will  be  recollected  with  respect,  veneration, 


THE  REVOLUTION  79 

and  affection  by  your  sincere  friend,  George  Wash 
ington.  " 

There  remains  another  Virginian,  the  symbol  of 
the  Revolutionary  age,  the  author  of  words  more 
widely  known  around  the  globe  than  any  other 
words  penned  by  an  American.  "Thomas  Jeffer 
son,"  writes  the  latest  of  his  successors  in  the  Presi 
dency,  "was  not  a  man  of  the  people,  but  he  was  a 
man  of  such  singular  insight  that  he  saw  that  all  the 
roots  of  generous  power  come  from  the  people. ' '  On 
his  father's  side  Jefferson  came  from  sound  yeoman 
stock,  in  which  Welsh  blood  ran.  His  mother 
was  a  Virginia  Randolph.  Born  in  Albemarle 
County,  near  the  "little  mountain"  —  Monticello 
-  where  he  built  a  mansion  for  his  bride  and  where 
he  lies  buried,  the  tall,  strong,  red-haired,  gray- 
eyed,  gifted  boy  was  reputed  the  best  shot,  the  best 
rider,  the  best  fiddle-player  in  the  county.  He 
studied  hard  at  William  and  Mary  over  his  Greek, 
Latin,  French,  Italian,  and  Spanish,  but  he  also 
frequented  the  best  society  of  the  little  capital. 
He  learned  to  call  himself  a  Deist  and  to  theorize 
about  ideal  commonwealths.  There  was  already 
in  him  that  latent  radicalism  which  made  him 
strike  down,  as  soon  as  he  had  the  power,  two  of  the 
fundamental  principles  of  the  society  into  which  he 


80     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

was  born,  the  principle  of  entailed  property  and 
that  of  church  establishment. 

Such  was  the  youth  of  twenty-two  who  was 
thrilled  in  1765  by  the  Stamp  Act.  In  the  ten 
years  of  passionate  discussion  which  followed,  two 
things  became  clear:  first,  that  there  had  long 
existed  among  the  colonists  very  radical  theoretical 
notions  of  political  freedom;  and  second,  that  there 
was  everywhere  a  spirit  of  practical  conserva 
tism.  Jefferson  illustrates  the  union  of  these  two 
tendencies. 

He  took  his  seat  in  the  Continental  Congress  in 
June,  1775.  He  was  only  thirty-two,  but  he  had 
already  written,  in  the  summer  of  1774,  A  Sum 
mary  View  of  the  Rights  of  British  America  which 
had  been  published  in  England  by  Burke,  himself 
a  judge  of  good  writing  and  sound  politics.  Jeffer 
son  had  also  prepared  in  1775  the  Address  of  the 
Virginia  House  of  Burgesses.  For  these  reasons  he 
was  placed  at  the  head  of  the  Committee  for  draft 
ing  the  Declaration  of  Independence.  We  need 
not  linger  over  the  familiar  circumstances  of  its 
composition.  Everybody  knows  how  Franklin 
and  Adams  made  a  few  verbal  alterations  in  the 
first  draft,  how  the  committee  of  five  then  reported 
it  to  the  Congress,  which  proceeded  to  cut  out 


THE  REVOLUTION  81 

about  one-fourth  of  the  matter,  while  Franklin 
tried  to  comfort  the  writhing  author  with  his  cheer 
ful  story  about  the  sign  of  John  Thompson  the 
hatter.  Forty-seven  years  afterwards,  in  reply 
to  the  charge  of  lack  of  originality  brought  against 
the  Declaration  by  Timothy  Pickering  and  John 
Adams — charges  which  have  been  repeated  at 
intervals  ever  since  —  Jefferson  replied  philosophi 
cally:  "Whether  I  gathered  my  ideas  from  reading 
or  reflection  I  do  not  know.  I  know  only  that  I 
turned  neither  to  book  nor  pamphlet  while  writing 
it.  I  did  not  consider  it  as  any  part  of  my  charge 
to  invent  new  ideas  altogether  and  to  offer  no 
sentiment  which  had  ever  been  expressed  before." 
O  wise  young  man,  and  fundamentally  Anglo- 
Saxon  young  man,  to  turn  his  back,  in  that  crisis, 
to  the  devil  of  mere  cleverness,  and  stick  to  recog 
nized  facts  and  accepted  sentiments!  But  his 
pen  retains  its  cunning  in  spite  of  him;  and  the 
drop  of  hot  Welsh  blood  tells;  and  the  cosmopoli 
tan  reading  and  thinking  tell;  and  they  transform 
what  Pickering  called  a  "commonplace  compila 
tion,  its  sentiments  hackneyed  in  Congress  for 
two  years  before, "  into  an  immortal  manifesto  to 
mankind. 

Its  method  is  the  simplest.     The  preamble  is 


82     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

philosophical,  dealing  with  "self -evident"  truths. 
Today  the  men  who  dislike  or  doubt  these  truths 
dismiss  the  preamble  as  "theoretical,"  or,  to  use 
another  term  of  derogation  favored  by  reaction 
aries,  "French."  But  if  the  preamble  be  French 
and  philosophical,  the  specific  charges  against  the 
King  are  very  English  and  practical.  Here  are 
certain  facts,  presented  no  doubt  with  consummate 
rhetorical  skill,  but  facts,  undeniably.  The  Anglo- 
Saxon  in  Jefferson  is  basal,  racial;  the  turn  for 
academic  philosophizing  after  the  French  fashion 
is  personal,  acquired;  but  the  range  and  sweep 
and  enduring  vitality  of  this  matchless  state 
paper  lie  in  its  illumination  of  stubborn  facts  by 
general  principles,  its  decent  respect  to  the  opin 
ions  of  mankind,  its  stately  and  noble  utterance 
of  national  sentiments  and  national  reasons  to  a 
"candid  world." 

It  has  long  been  the  fashion,  among  a  certain 
school  of  half-hearted  Americans  —  and  unless  I 
am  mistaken,  the  teaching  has  increased  during 
the  last  decades  —  to  minimize  the  value  of  Jeffer 
son's  "self-evident  truths."  Rufus  Choate,  him 
self  a  consummate  rhetorician,  sneered  at  those 
"glittering  generalities,"  and  countless  college- 
bred  men,  some  of  them  occupying  the  highest 


THE  REVOLUTION  83 

positions,  have  echoed  the  sneer.  The  essence  of 
the  objection  to  Jefferson's  platform  lies  of  course 
in  his  phrase,  "all  men  are  created  equal,"  with 
the  subsidiary  phrase  about  governments  "deriv 
ing  their  just  powers  from  the  consent  of  the 
governed."  Editors  and  congressmen  and  even 
college  professors  have  proclaimed  themselves 
unable  to  assent  to  these  phrases  of  the  Declara 
tion,  and  unable  even  to  understand  them.  These 
objectors  belong  partly,  I  think,  in  Jefferson's 
category  of  "nervous  persons"  —  "anti-repub 
licans,"  as  he  goes  on  to  define  them  —  "whose 
languid  fibres  have  more  analogy  with  a  passive 
than  an  active  state  of  things."  Other  objectors 
to  the  phrase  "all  men  are  created  equal"  have 
had  an  obvious  personal  or  political  motive  for 
refusing  assent  to  the  proposition.  But  "no  in 
telligent  man, "  says  one  of  Jefferson's  biographers, 
"has  ever  misconstrued  it  [the  Declaration]  except 
intentionally. " 

Nobody  would  claim  today  that  Thomas  Jeffer 
son's  statement  of  the  sentiments  and  reasons  for 
the  independence  of  the  thirteen  British  colonies 
in  1776  was  an  adequate  handbook  of  political 
wisdom,  fit  for  all  the  exigencies  of  contemporary 
American  democracy.  It  is  not  that.  It  is 


84     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

simply,  in  Lincoln's  phrase,  one  of  "the  standard 
maxims  of  free  society"  which  no  democracy  can 
safely  disregard. 

Jefferson's  long  life,  so  varied,  so  flexible,  so 
responsive  to  the  touch  of  popular  forces,  illus 
trates  the  process  by  which  the  Virginia  mind  of 
1743  became  the  nationalized,  unionized  mind  of 
1826.  It  is  needless  here  to  dwell  upon  the  traits 
of  his  personal  character:  his  sweetness  of  spirit, 
his  stout-heartedness  in  disaster,  his  scorn  of 
money,  his  love  for  the  intellectual  life.  "I  have 
no  ambition  to  govern  men,"  he  wrote  to  Edward 
Rutledge.  He  was  far  happier  talking  about 
Greek  and  Anglo-Saxon  with  Daniel  Webster 
before  the  fire-place  of  Monticello  than  he  ever 
was  in  the  presidential  chair.  His  correspondence 
was  enormous.  His  writings  fill  twenty  volumes. 
In  his  theories  of  education  he  was  fifty  years 
ahead  of  his  time;  in  his  absolute  trust  in  humanity 
he  was  generations  ahead  of  it.  "I  am  not  one  of 
those  who  fear  the  people,"  he  declared  proudly. 
It  is  because  of  this  touching  faith,  this  invincible 
and  matchless  ardor,  that  Jefferson  is  today  re 
membered.  He  foreshadowed  Lincoln.  His  be 
lief  in  the  inarticulate  common  people  is  rewarded 
by  their  obstinate  fidelity  to  his  name  as  a  type  and 


THE  REVOLUTION  85 

symbol.  "I  know  of  no  safe  depository  of  the 
ultimate  powers  of  society  but  the  people  them 
selves,  "  wrote  Jefferson,  and  with  the  people  them 
selves  is  the  depository  of  his  fame. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE  KNICKERBOCKER   GROUP 

THE  Fourth  of  July  orator  for  1826  in  Cambridge, 
Massachusetts,  was  Edward  Everett.  Although 
only  thirty-two  he  was  already  a  distinguished 
speaker.  In  the  course  of  his  oration  he  apostro 
phized  John  Adams  and  Thomas  Jefferson  as 
venerable  survivors  of  that  momentous  day,  fifty 
years  earlier,  which  had  witnessed  our  Declaration 
of  Independence.  But  even  as  Everett  was  speak 
ing,  the  aged  author  of  the  Declaration  breathed 
his  last  at  Monticello,  and  in  the  afternoon  of  that 
same  day  Adams  died  also,  murmuring,  it  is  said, 
with  his  latest  breath,  and  as  if  with  the  whimsical 
obstinacy  of  an  old  man  who  hated  to  be  beaten 
by  his  ancient  rival,  "Thomas  Jefferson  still  lives." 
But  Jefferson  was  already  gone. 

On  the  first  of  August,  Everett  commemorated 
the  career  of  the  two  Revolutionary  leaders,  and 
on  the  following  day  a  greater  than  Everett,  Daniel 

86 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP          87 

Webster,  pronounced  the  famous  eulogy  in  Faneuil 
Hall.  Never  were  the  thoughts  and  emotions  of  a 
whole  country  more  adequately  voiced  than  in  this 
commemorative  oratory.  Its  pulse  was  high  with 
national  pride  over  the  accomplishments  of  half 
a  century.  "I  ask,"  Everett  declared,  "whether 
more  has  not  been  done  to  extend  the  domain  of 
civilization,  in  fifty  years,  since  the  Declaration  of 
Independence,  than  would  have  been  done  in  five 
centuries  of  continued  colonial  subjection?"  Web 
ster  asserted  in  his  peroration:  "It  cannot  be 
denied,  but  by  those  who  would  dispute  against 
the  sun,  that  with  America,  and  in  America,  a  new 
era  commences  in  human  affairs.  This  era  is 
distinguished  by  free  representative  governments, 
by  entire  religious  liberty,  by  improved  systems 
of  national  intercourse,  by  a  newly  awakened  and 
an  unconquerable  spirit  of  free  enquiry,  and  by 
a  diffusion  of  knowledge  through  the  community 
such  as  has  been  before  altogether  unknown  and 
unheard  of. " 

Was  this  merely  the  "tall  talk"  then  so  charac 
teristic  of  American  oratory  and  soon  to  be  satirized 
in  Martin  Chuzzlewit?  Or  was  it  prompted  by  a 
deep  and  true  instinct  for  the  significance  of  the 
vast  changes  that  had  come  over  American  life 


88     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

since  1776?  The  external  changes  were  familiar 
enough  to  Webster's  auditors :  the  opening  of  seem 
ingly  illimitable  territory  through  the  Louisiana 
Purchase,  the  development  of  roads,  canals,  and 
manufactures ;  a  rapid  increase  in  wealth  and  popu 
lation;  a  shifting  of  political  power  due  to  the  rise 
of  the  new  West  —  in  a  word,  the  evidences  of  ir 
repressible  national  energy.  But  this  energy  was 
inadequately  expressed  by  the  national  literature. 
The  more  cultivated  Americans  were  quite  aware 
of  this  deficiency.  It  was  confessed  by  the  pessi 
mistic  Fisher  Ames  and  by  the  ardent  young  men 
who  in  1815  founded  The  North  American  Review. 
British  critics  in  The  Edinburgh  and  The  Quarterly, 
commenting  upon  recent  works  of  travel  in  Amer 
ica,  pointed  out  the  literary  poverty  of  the  Amer 
ican  soil.  Sydney  Smith,  by  no  means  the  most 
offensive  of  these  critics,  declared  in  1820:  "Dur 
ing  the  thirty  or  forty  years  of  their  independence 
they  have  done  absolutely  nothing  for  the  sciences, 
for  the  arts,  for  literature.  ...  In  the  four 
quarters  of  the  globe,  who  reads  an  American  book? 
or  goes  to  an  American  play?  or  looks  at  an  Amer 
ican  picture  or  statue?" 

Sydney  Smith's  question  "Who  reads  an  Amer 
ican  book?"  has  outlived  all  of  his  own  clever 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP          89 

volumes.  Even  while  he  was  asking  it,  London 
was  eagerly  reading  Irving's  Sketch  Book.  In  1821 
came  Fenimore  Cooper's  Spy  and  Bryant's  Poems, 
and  by  1826,  when  Webster  was  announcing  in  his 
rolling  orotund  that  Adams  and  Jefferson  were  no 
more,  the  London  and  Paris  booksellers  were  cover 
ing  their  stalls  with  Cooper's  The  Last  of  the  Mo 
hicans.  Irving,  Cooper,  and  Bryant  are  thus  the 
pioneers  in  a  new  phase  of  American  literary 
activity,  often  called,  for  convenience  in  labeling, 
the  Knickerbocker  Group  because  of  the  identi 
fication  of  these  men  with  New  York/  And  close 
behind  these  leaders  come  a  younger  company, 
destined  likewise,  in  the  shy  boyish  words  of 
Hawthorne,  one  of  the  number,  "to  write  books 
that  would  be  read  in  England."  For  by  1826 
Hawthorne  and  Longfellow  were  out  of  college  and 
were  trying  to  learn  to  write.  Ticknor,  Prescott, 
and  Bancroft,  somewhat  older  men,  were  settling 
to  their  great  tasks.  Emerson  was  entering  upon 
his  duties  as  a  minister.  Edgar  Allan  Poe,  at 
that  University  of  Virginia  which  Jefferson  had 
just  founded,  was  doubtless  revising  Tamerlane 
and  Other  Poems  which  he  was  to  publish  in  Boston 
hi  the  following  year.  Holmes  was  a  Har 
vard  undergraduate.  Garrison  had  just  printed 


90     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Whittier's  first  published  poem  in  the  Newbury- 
port  Free  Press.  Walt  Whitman  was  a  barefooted 
boy  on  Long  Island,  and  Lowell,  likewise  seven 
years  of  age,  was  watching  the  birds  in  the  tree- 
tops  of  Elmwood.  But  it  was  Washington  Irving 
who  showed  all  of  these  men  that  nineteenth  cen 
tury  England  would  be  interested  in  American 
books. 

The  very  word  Knickerbocker  is  one  evidence 
of  the  vitality  of  Irving's  happy  imaginings.  In 
1809  he  had  invented  a  mythical  Dutch  historian 
of  New  York  named  Diedrich  Knickerbocker  and 
fathered  upon  him  a  witty  parody  of  Dr.  Mitchill's 
grave  Picture  of  New  York.  To  read  Irving's 
chapters  today  is  to  witness  one  of  the  rarest  and 
most  agreeable  of  phenomena,  namely,  the  actual 
beginning  of  a  legend  which  the  world  is  unwilling 
to  let  die.  The  book  made  Sir  Walter  Scott's 
sides  ache  with  laughter,  and  reminded  him  of  the 
humor  of  Swift  and  Sterne.  But  certain  New 
Yorkers  were  slow  to  see  the  joke^ 

Irving  was  himself  a  New  Yorker,  born  just  at 
the  close  of  the  Resolution,  of  a  Scotch  father  and 
English  mother.  His  youth  was  pleasantly  idle, 
with  a  little  raifdom  education,  much  theater 
going,  and  plentiful  rambles  with  a  gun  along  the 

A 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP          91 

Hudson  River.  In  1804  he  went  abroad  for  his 
health,  returned  and  helped  to  write  the  light  social 
satire  of  the  Salmagundi  Papers,  and  became,  after 
the  publication  of  the  Knickerbocker  History,  a 
local  celebrity.  Sailing  for  England  in  1815  on 
business,  he  stayed  until  1832  as  a  roving  man  of 
letters  in  England  and  Spain  and  then  as  Secretary 
of  the  American  Legation  in  London.  The  Sketch 
Book,  Bracebridge  Hall,  and  Tales  of  a  Traveler  are 
the  best  known  productions  of  Irving's  fruitful 
residence  in  England.  The  Life  of  Columbus,  the 
Conquest  of  Granada,  and  The  Alhambra  represent 
his  first  sojourn  in  Spain.  After  his  return  to 
America  he  became  fascinated  with  the  Great 
West,  made  the  travels  described  in  his  Tour  of  the 
Prairies,  and  told  the  story  of  roving  trappers  and 
the  fur  trade  in  Captain  Bonneville  and  Astoria. 
For  four  years  he  returned  to  Spain  as  American 
Minister.  In  his  last  tranquil  years  at  Sunnyside 
on  the  Hudson,  where  he  died  in  1859,  he  wrote 
graceful  lives  of  Goldsmith  and  of  Washington. 

Such  a  glance  at  the  shelf  containing  Irving's 
books  suggests  but  little  of  that  personal  quality 
to  which  he  owes  his  significance  as  an  interpreter 
of  America  to  the  Old  World.  This  son  of  a 
narrow,  hard,  Scotch  dealer  in  cutlery,  this  drifter 


92     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

about  town  when  New  York  was  only  a  big  slov 
enly  village,  this  light-hearted  scribbler  of  satire 
and  sentiment,  was  a  gentleman  born.  His  boyhood 
and  youth  were  passed  in  that  period  of  Post- 
Revolutionary  reaction  which  exhibits  the  United 
States  in  some  of  its  most  unlovely  aspects. 
Historians  like  Henry  Adams  and  McMaster  have 
painted  in  detail  the  low  estate  of  education,  re 
ligion,  and  art  as  the  new  century  began.  The 
bitter  feeling  of  the  nascent  nation  toward  Great 
Britain  was  intensified  by  the  War  of  1812.  The 
Napoleonic  Wars  had  threatened  to  break  the  last 
threads  of  our  friendship  for  France,  and  suspicion 
of  the  Holy  Alliance  led  to  an  era  of  national  self- 
assertion  of  which  the  Monroe  Doctrine  was  only 
one  expression.  The  raw  Jacksonism  of  the  West 
seemed  to  be  gaining  upon  the  older  civilizations 
represented  by  Virginia  and  Massachusetts.  The 
self-made  type  of  man  began  to  pose  as  the  genuine 
American.  And  at  this  moment  came  forward  a 
man  of  natural  lucidity  and  serenity  of  mind,  of 
perfect  poise  and  good  temper,  who  knew  both 
Europe  and  America  and  felt  that  they  ought  to 
know  one  another  better  and  to  like  one  another 
more.  That  was  Irving's  service  as  an  inter 
national  mediator.  He  diffused  sweetness  and 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP          93 

light  in  an  era  marked  by  bitterness  and  obscura- 
t  on.  It  was  a  triumph  of  character  as  well  as  of 
literary  skill. 

But  the  skill  was  very  noticeable  also.  Irving's 
prose  is  not  that  of  the  Defoe-Swift-Franklin- 
Paine  type  of  plain  talk  to  the  crowd.  It  is  rather 
an  inheritance  from  that  other  eighteenth  century 
tradition,  the  conversation  of  the  select  circle. 
Its  accents  were  heard  in  Steele  and  Addison  and 
were  continued  in  Goldsmith,  Sterne,  Cowper, 
and  Charles  Lamb.  Among  Irving's  successors, 
George  William  Curtis  and  Charles  Dudley  War 
ner  and  William  Dean  Howells  have  been  masters 
of  it  likewise.  It  is  mellow  human  talk,  delicate, 
regardful,  capable  of  exquisite  modulation.  With 
instinctive  artistic  taste,  Irving  used  this  old  and 
sound  style  upon  fresh  American  material.  In 
Rip  van  Winkle  and  The  Legend  of  Sleepy  Hollow 
he  portrayed  his  native  valley  of  the  Hudson,  and 
for  a  hundred  years  connoisseurs  of  style  have 
perceived  the  exquisite  fitness  of  the  language  to 
the  images  and  ideas  which  Irving  desired  to  con 
vey.  To  render  the  Far  West  of  that  epoch  this 
style  is  perhaps  not  "big"  and  broad  enough,  but 
when  used  as  Irving  uses  it  in  describing  Stratford 
and  Westminster  Abbey  and  an  Old  English 


94     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Christmas,  it  becomes  again  a  perfect  medium. 
Hawthorne  adopted  it  for  Our  Old  Home,  and  Eng 
lishmen  recognized  it  at  once  as  a  part  of  their 
own  inheritance,  enriched,  like  certain  wines,  by  the 
voyage  across  the  Atlantic  and  home  again.  Ir 
ving  wrote  of  England,  Mr.  Warner  once  said,  as 
Englishmen  would  have  liked  to  write  about  it. 
When  he  described  the  Alhambra  and  Granada 
and  the  Moors,  it  was  the  style,  rich  both  in 
physical  sensation  and  in  dreamlike  reverie,  which 
revealed  to  the  world  the  quick  American  appre 
ciation  of  foreign  scenes  and  characters.  Its  key 
is  sympathy. 

Irving's  popularity  has  endured  in  England.  It 
suffered  during  the  middle  of  the  century  in  his 
own  country,  for  the  strongest  New  England 
authors  taught  the  public  to  demand  more  thought 
and  passion  than  were  in  Irving's  nature.  Possibly 
the  nervous,  journalistic  style  of  the  twentieth 
century  allows  too  scanty  leisure  of  mind  for  the 
full  enjoyment  of  the  Knickerbocker  flavor.  Yet 
such  changes  as  these  in  literary  fashion  scarcely 
affect  the  permanent  service  of  Irving  to  our  liter 
ature.  He  immortalized  a  local  type  —  the  New 
York  Dutchman  —  and  local  legends,  like  that  of 
Rip  van  Winkle;  he  used  the  framework  of  the 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP          95 

narrative  essay  to  create  something  almost  like 
the  perfected  short  story  of  Poe  and  Hawthorne; 
he  wrote  prose  with  unfailing  charm  in  an  age  when 
charm  was  lacking;  and,  if  he  had  no  message,  it 
should  be  remembered  that  some  of  the  most  use 
ful  ambassadors  have  had  none  save  to  reveal, 
with  delicacy  and  tact  and  humorous  kindness,  the 
truth  that  foreign  persons  have  feelings  precisely 
like  our  own. 

Readers  of  Sir  Walter  Scott's  Journal  may 
remember  his  account  of  an  evening  party  in  Paris 
in  1826  where  he  met  Fenimore  Cooper,  then  in 
the  height  of  his  European  reputation.  "So  the 
Scotch  and  American  lions  took  the  field  together, " 
wrote  Sir  Walter,  who  loved  to  be  generous.  The 
Last  of  the  Mohicans,  then  just  published,  threat 
ened  to  eclipse  the  fame  of  Ivanhoe.  Cooper,  born 
in  1789,  was  eighteen  years  younger  than  the  Wiz 
ard  of  the  North,  and  was  more  deeply  indebted 
to  him  than  he  knew.  For  it  was  Scott  who  had 
created  the  immense  nineteenth  century  audience 
for  prose  fiction,  and  who  had  evolved  a  kind  of 
formula  for  the  novel,  ready  for  Cooper's  use. 
Both  men  were  natural  story-tellers.  Scott  had 
the  richer  mind  and  the  more  fully  developed 
historical  imagination.  Both  were  out-of-doors 


96     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

men,  lovers  of  manly  adventure  and  of  natural 
beauty.  But  the  American  had  the  good  fortune 
to  be  able  to  utilize  in  his  books  his  personal 
experiences  of  forest  and  sea  and  to  reveal  to 
Europe  the  real  romance  of  the  American  wilder 
ness. 

That  Cooper  was  the  first  to  perceive  the  ar 
tistic  possibilities  of  this  romance,  no  one  would 
claim.  Brockden  Brown,  a  Quaker  youth  of 
Philadelphia,  a  disciple  of  the  English  Godwin, 
had  tried  his  hand  at  the  very  end  of  the  eighteenth 
century  upon  American  variations  of  the  Gothic 
romance  then  popular  in  England.  Brown  had  a 
keen  eye  for  the  values  of  the  American  landscape 
and  even  of  the  American  Indian.  He  had  a  knack 
for  passages  of  ghastly  power,  as  his  descriptions 
of  maniacs,  murderers,  sleep-walkers,  and  soli 
taries  abundantly  prove.  But  he  had  read  toe 
much  and  lived  too  little  to  rival  the  masters  oi 
the  art  of  fiction.  And  there  was  a  traveled 
*  Frenchman,  Chateaubriand,  surely  an  expert  in 
the  art  of  eloquent  prose,  who  had  transferred  tc 
the  pages  of  his  American  Indian  stories,  Atalo 
and  Rent,  the  mystery  and  enchantment  of  oui 
dark  forests  and  endless  rivers.  But  Chateau 
briand,  like  Brockden  Brown,  is  feverish.  A  taint 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP          97 

of  old-world  eroticism  and  despair  hovers  like  a 
miasma  over  his  magnificent  panorama  of  the 
wilderness.  Cooper,  like  Scott,  is  masculine. 

He  was  a  Knickerbocker  only  by  adoption. 
Born  in  New  Jersey,  his  childhood  was  spent  in  the 
then  remote  settlement  of  Cooperstown  in  Central 
New  York.  He  had  a  little  schooling  at  Albany, 
and  a  brief  and  inglorious  career  at  Yale  with  the 
class  of  1806.  He  went  to  sea  for  two  years,  and 
then  served  for  three  years  in  the  United  States 
Navy  upon  Lakes  Ontario  and  Champlain,  the 
very  scene  of  some  of  his  best  stories.  In  1811 
he  married,  resigned  from  the  Navy,  and  settled 
upon  a  little  estate  in  Westchester  County,  near 
New  York.  Until  the  age  of  thirty,  he  was  not  in 
the  least  a  bookman,  but  a  healthy  man  of  action. 
Then,  as  the  well-known  anecdote  goes,  he  exclaims 
to  his  wife,  after  reading  a  stupid  English  novel, 
"I  believe  I  could  write  a  better  story  myself." 
Precaution  (1820)  was  the  result,  but  whether  it 
was  better  than  the  unknown  English  book,  no 
one  can  now  say.  It  was  bad  enough.  Yet  the 
next  year  Cooper  published  The  Spy,  one  of  the 
finest  of  his  novels,  which  was  instantly  welcomed 
in  England  and  translated  in  France.  Then  came, 
in  swift  succession,  The  Pioneers,  the  first  Leather- 


98     AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Stocking  tale  in  order  of  composition,  and  The 
Pilot,  to  show  that  Scott's  Pirate  was  written  by  a 
landsman!  Lionel  Lincoln  and  The  Last  of  the 
Mohicans  followed.  The  next  seven  years  were 
spent  in  Europe,  mainly  in  France,  where  The 
Prairie  and  The  Red  Rover  were  written.  Cooper 
now  looked  back  upon  his  countrymen  with  eyes 
of  critical  detachment,  and  made  ready  to  tell 
them  some  of  their  faults.  He  came  home  to 
Cooperstown  in  1833,  the  year  after  Irving's  re 
turn  to  America.  He  had  won,  deservedly,  a  great 
fame,  which  he  proceeded  to  imperil  by  his  com- 
bativeness  with  his  neighbors  and  his  harsh  stric 
tures  upon  the  national  character,  due  mainly  to 
his  lofty  conception  of  the  ideal  America.  He 
continued  to  spin  yarns  of  sea  and  shore,  and  to 
write  naval  history.  The  tide  of  fashion  set 
against  him  in  the  eighteen-forties  when  Bulwer 
and  Dickens  rode  into  favor,  but  the  stout 
hearted  old  pioneer  could  afford  to  bide  his  time. 
He  died  in  1851,  just  as  Mrs.  Stowe  was  writing 
Uncle  Tom's  Cabin. 

Two  generations  have  passed  since  then,  and 
Cooper's  place  in  our  literature  remains  secure. 
To  have  written  our  first  historical  novel,  The  Spy, 
our  first  sea-story,  The  Pilot,  and  to  have  created 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP       99 

the  Leather-Stocking  series,  is  glory  enough.  In 
his  perception  of  masculine  character,  Cooper 
ranks  with  Fielding.  His  sailors,  his  scouts  and 
spies,  his  good  and  bad  Indians,  are  as  veritable 
human  figures  as  Squire  Western.  Long  Tom 
Coffin,  Harvey  Birch,  Hawk-Eye,  and  Chingach- 
gook  are  physically  and  morally  true  to  life  itself. 
Read  the  Leather-Stocking  books  in  the  order  of 
the  events  described,  beginning  with  The  Deerslayer, 
then  The  Last  of  the  Mohicans,  The  Pathfinder, 
The  Pioneers,  and  ending  with  the  vast  darkening 
horizon  of  The  Prairie  and  the  death  of  the  trapper, 
and  one  will  feel  how  natural  and  inevitable  are 
the  fates  of  the  personages  and  the  alterations  in 
the  life  of  the  frontier.  These  books  vary  in  their 
poetic  quality  and  in  the  degree  of  their  realism, 
but  to  watch  the  evolution  of  the  leading  figure  is 
to  see  human  life  in  its  actual  texture. 

Clever  persons  and  pedantic  persons  have  united 
to  find  fault  with  certain  elements  of  Cooper's 
art.  Mark  Twain,  in  one  of  his  least  inspired 
moments,  selected  Cooper's  novels  for  attack. 
Every  grammar  school  teacher  is  ready  to  point 
out  that  his  style  is  often  prolix  and  his  sentences 
are  sometimes  ungrammatical.  Amateurs  even 
criticize  Cooper's  seamanship,  although  it  seemed 


100   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

impeccable  to  Admiral  'Mahan.  No  doubt  one 
must  admit  the  "helplessness,  propriety,  and  in 
capacity"  of  most  of  Cooper's  women,  and  the 
dreadfulness  of  his  bores,  particularly  the  Scotch 
men,  the  doctors,  and  the  naturalists.  Like  Sir 
Walter,  Cooper  seems  to  have  taken  but  little  pains 
in  the  deliberate  planning  of  his  plots.  Frequently 
he  accepts  a  ready-made  formula  of  villain  and 
hero,  predicament  and  escape,  renewed  crisis  and 
rescue,  mystification  and  explanation,  worthy  of  a 
third-rate  novelist.  His  salvation  lies  in  his  genius 
for  action,  the  beauty  and  grandeur  of  his  land 
scapes,  the  primitive  veracity  of  his  children  of 
nature. 

Cooper  was  an  elemental  man,  and  he  compre 
hended,  by  means  of  something  deeper  than  mere 
artistic  instinct,  the  feelings  of  elemental  humanity 
in  the  presence  of  the  wide  ocean  or  of  the  deep 
woods.  He  is  as  healthy  and  sane  as  Fielding,  and 
he  possesses  an  additional  quality  which  all  of  the 
purely  English  novelists  lack.  It  was  the  result 
of  his  youthful  sojourn  in  the  wilderness.  Let 
us  call  it  the  survival  in  him  of  an  aboriginal 
imagination.  Cooper  reminds  one  somehow  of 
a  moose — an  ungraceful  creature  perhaps,  but 
indubitably  big,  as  many  a  hunter  has  suddenly 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP        101 

realized  when  he  has  come  unexpectedly  upon  a 
moose  that  whirled  to  face  him  in  the  twilight 
silence  of  a  northern  wood. 

Something  of  this  far-off  and  gigantic  primi- 
tivism  inheres  also  in  the  poetry  of  William  Cullen 
Bryant.  His  portrait,  with  the  sweeping  white 
beard  and  the  dark  folds  of  the  cloak,  suggests  the 
Bard  as  the  Druids  might  have  known  him.  But 
in  the  eighteen-thirties  and  forties,  Mr.  Bryant's 
alert,  clean-shaven  face,  and  energetic  gait"  as  he 
strode  down  Broadway  to  the  Evening  Post  office, 
suggested  little  more  than  a  vigorous  and  somewhat 
radical  editor  of  an  increasingly  prosperous  Demo 
cratic  newspaper.  There  was  nothing  of  the 
Fringed  Gentian  or  Yellow  Violet  about  him.  Like 
so  many  of  the  Knickerbockers,  Bryant  was  an 
immigrant  to  New  York;  in  fact,  none  of  her 
adopted  men  of  letters  have  represented  so  per 
fectly  the  inherited  traits  of  the  New  England 
Puritan.  To  understand  his  long  and  honorable 
public  life  it  is  necessary  to  know  something  of  the 
city  of  his  choice,  but  to  enter  into  the  spirit  of  his 
poetry  one  must  go  back  to  the  hills  of  western 
Massachusetts. 

Bryant  had  a  right  to  his  cold- weather  mind. 
He  came  from  Mayflower  stock.  His  father,  Dr. 


102  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Peter  Bryant  of  Cummington,  was  a  sound  coun 
try  physician,  with  liberal  preferences  in  theology, 
Federalist  views  in  politics,  and  a  library  of  seven 
hundred  volumes,  rich  in  poetry.  The  poet's 
mother  records  his  birth  in  her  diary  in  terse  words 
which  have  the  true  Spartan  tang:  "Nov.  3,  1794. 
Stormy,  wind  N.  E.  Churned.  Seven  in  the 
evening  a  son  born. "  Two  days  later  the  Novem 
ber  wind  shifted.  "Nov.  5,  1794.  Clear,  wind 
N.  W.  Made  Austin  a  coat.  Sat  up  all  day. 
Went  into  the  kitchen."  The  baby,  it  appears, 
had  an  abnormally  large  head  and  was  dipped, 
day  after  day,  in  rude  hydropathy,  into  an  icy 
spring.  A  precocious  childhood  was  followed  by  a 
stern,  somewhat  unhappy,  but  aspiring  boyhood. 
The  little  fellow,  lying  prone  with  his  brothers 
before  the  firelight  of  the  Kitchen,  reading  English 
poetry  from  his  father's  library,  used  to  pray  that 
he  too  might  become  a  poet.  At  thirteen  he  pro 
duced  a  satire  on  Jefferson,  The  Embargo,  which  his 
proud  Federalist  father  printed  at  Boston  in  1808. 
The  youth  had  nearly  one  year  at  Williams  Col 
lege,  over  the  mountain  ranges  to  the  west.  He 
wished  to  continue  his  education  at  Yale,  but  his 
father  had  no  money  for  this  greater  venture,  and 
the  son  remained  at  home.  There,  in  the  autumn 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP        103 

of  1811,  on  the  bleak  hills,  he  composed  the  first 
draft  of  Tkanatopsis.  He  was  seventeen,  and 
he  had  been  reading  Blair's  Grave  and  the  poems 
of  the  consumptive  Henry  Kirke  White.  He  hid 
his  verses  in  a  drawer,  and  five  years  later  his 
father  found  them,  shed  tears  over  them,  and  sent 
them  to  the  North  American  Review,  where  they 
were  published  in  September,  1817. 

In  the  meantime  the  young  man  had  studied  law, 
though  with  dislike  of  it,  and  with  the  confession 
that  he  sometimes  read  The  Lyrical  Ballads  when 
he  might  have  been  reading  Blackstone.  One 
December  afternoon  in  1815,  he  was  walking  from 
Cummington  to  Plainfield  —  aged  twenty-one,  and 
looking  for  a  place  in  which  to  settle  as  a  lawyer. 
Across  the  vivid  sunset  flew  a  black  duck,  as  soli 
tary  and  homeless  as  himself.  The  bird  seemed  an 
image  of  his  own  soul,  "lone  wandering  but  not 
lost."  Before  he  slept  that  night  he  had  composed 
the  poem  To  a  Waterfowl.  No  more  authentic 
inspiration  ever  visited  a  poet,  and  though  Bryant 
wrote  verse  for  more  than  sixty  years  after  that 
crimson  sky  had  paled  into  chill  December  twilight, 
his  lines  never  again  vibrated  with  such  communi 
cative  passion. 

Bryant's  ensuing  career  revealed  the  steady  pur- 


104   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

pose,  the  stoicism,  the  reticence  of  the  Puritan. 
It  was  highly  successful,  judged  even  by  material 
standards.  Thanatopsis  had  been  instantly  re 
garded  in  1817  as  the  finest  poem  yet  produced  in 
America.  The  author  was  invited  to  contribute 
to  the  North  American  Review  an  essay  on  American 
poetry,  and  this,  like  all  of  Bryant's  prose  work, 
was  admirably  written.  He  delivered  his  Harvard 
Phi  Beta  Kappa  poem,  The  Ages,  in  1821,  the  year 
of  Emerson's  graduation.  After  a  brief  practice  of 
the  law  in  Great  Barrington,  he  entered  in  1826 
into  the  unpromising  field  of  journalism  in  New 
York.  While  other  young  Knickerbockers  wasted 
their  literary  strength  on  trifles  and  dissipated  their 
moral  energies,  Bryant  held  steadily  to  his  daily 
task.  His  life  in  town  was  sternly  ascetic,  but  he 
allowed  himself  long  walks  in  the  country,  and  he 
continued  to  meditate  a  somewhat  thankless  Muse. 
In  1832  he  visited  his  brothers  on  the  Illinois  prai 
ries,  and  stopped  one  day  to  chat  with  a  "tall  awk 
ward  uncouth  lad"  of  racy  conversational  powers, 
who  was  leading  his  company  of  volunteers  into 
the  Black  Hawk  War.  The  two  men  were  destined 
to  meet  again  in  1860,  when  Bryant  presided  at 
that  Cooper  Union  address  of  Lincoln's  which  re 
vealed  to  New  York  and  to  the  country  that  the 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP        105 

former  captain  of  volunteers  was  now  a  king  of 
men.  Lincoln  was  embarrassed  on  that  occasion, 
it  is  said,  by  Bryant's  fastidious,  dignified  presence. 
Not  so  Nathaniel  Hawthorne,  who  had  seen  the 
poet  in  Rome,  two  years  before.  "There  was  a 
weary  look  in  his  face,"  wrote  Hawthorne,  "as  if 
he  were  tired  of  seeing  things  and  doing  things. 
.  .  .  He  uttered  neither  passion  nor  poetry,  but 
excellent  good  sense,  and  accurate  information, 
on  whatever  subject  transpired;  a  very  pleasant 
man  to  associate  with,  but  rather  cold,  I  should 
imagine,  if  one  should  seek  to  touch  his  heart  with 
one's  own."  Such  was  the  impression  Bryant 
made  upon  less  gifted  men  than  Hawthorne,  as  he 
lived  out  his  long  and  useful  life  in  the  Knicker 
bocker  city.  Toward  the  close  of  it  he  was  in 
great  demand  for  public  occasions;  and  it  was  after 
delivering  a  speech  dedicating  a  statue  to  Mazzini 
in  Central  Park  in  1878,  when  Bryant  was  eighty- 
four,  that  a  fit  of  dizziness  caused  a  fall  which 
proved  fatal  to  the  venerable  poet.  It  was  just 
seventy  years  since  Dr.  Peter  Bryant  had  published 
his  boy's  verses  on  The  Embargo. 

Although  Bryant's  poetry  has  never  roused  any 
vociferous  excitement,  it  has  enduring  qualities. 
The  spiritual  preoccupations  of  many  a  voiceless 


106   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

generation  of  New  England  Puritans  found  a 
tongue  at  last  in  this  late-born  son  of  theirs.  The 
determining  mood  of  his  best  poems,  from  boy 
hood  to  old  age,  was  precisely  that  thought  of 
transiency,  "the  eternal  flow  of  things,"  which 
colored  the  imaginations  of  the  first  colonists. 
This  is  the  central  motive  of  Thanatopsis,  To  a 
Waterfowl,  The  Rivulet,  A  Forest  Hymn,  An  Evening 
Revery,  The  Crowded  Street,  The  Flood  of  Years. 
All  of  these  tell  the  same  story  of  endless  change 
and  of  endless  abiding,  of  varying  eddies  in  the 
same  mighty  stream  of  human  existence.  Bryant 
faced  the  thought  as  calmly,  as  majestically,  at 
seventeen  as  when  he  wrote  The  Flood  of  Years  at 
eighty-two.  He  is  a  master  of  description,  though 
he  has  slight  gift  for  narrative  or  drama,  and  he 
rarely  sounds  the  clear  lyric  note.  But  everywhere 
in  his  verse  there  is  that  cold  purity  of  the  winter 
hills  in  Western  Massachusetts,  something  austere 
and  elemental  which  reaches  kindred  spirits  below 
the  surface  on  which  intellect  and  passion  have 
their  play,  something  more  primitive,  indeed,  than 
human  intellect  or  passion  and  belonging  to  an 
other  mode  of  being,  something  "rock-ribbed  and 
ancient  as  the  sun. " 

A  picture  of  the  Knickerbocker  era  is  not  com- 


THE  KNICKERBOCKER  GROUP        107 

plete  without  its  portraits  of  the  minor  figures  in 
the  literary  life  of  New  York  up  to  the  time  of  the 
Civil  War.  But  the  scope  of  the  present  volume 
does  not  permit  sketches  of  Paulding  and  Ver- 
planck,  of  Halleck  and  his  friend  Drake,  of  N.  P. 
Willis  and  Morris  and  Woodworth.  Some  of  these 
are  today  only  "single-poem"  men,  like  Payne, 
the  author  of  Home  Sweet  Home,  just  as  Key,  the 
author  of  The  Star-Spangled  Banner,  is  today 
a  "single-poem"  man  of  an  earlier  generation. 
Their  names  will  be  found  in  such  limbos  of  the 
dead  as  Gris wold's  Poets  and  Poetry  of  America 
and  Poe's  Literati.  They  knew  "the  town"  in 
their  day,  and  pleased  its  very  easily  pleased 
taste.  The  short-lived  literary  magazines  of  the 
eighteen-forties  gave  them  their  hour  of  glory. 
As  representatives  of  passing  phases  of  the  liter 
ary  history  of  New  York  their  careers  are  not  with 
out  sentimental  interest,  but  few  of  them  spoke  to 
or  for  the  country  as  a  whole.  Two  figures,  in 
deed,  stand  out  in  sharp  contrast  with  those  habit 
ual  strollers  on  Broadway  and  frequenters  of 
literary  gatherings,  though  each  of  them  was  for  a 
while  a  part  of  Knickerbocker  New  York.  To  all 
appearances  they  were  only  two  more  Bohemians 
like  the  rest,  but  the  curiosity  of  the  twentieth 


108   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

century  sets  them  apart  from  their  forgotten  con 
temporaries.  They  are  two  of  the  unluckiest  — 
and  yet  luckiest  —  authors  who  ever  tried  to  sell 
a  manuscript  along  Broadway.  One  of  them  i? 
Edgar  Allan  Poe  and  the  other  is  Walt  Whitman. 
They  shall  have  a  chapter  to  themselves. 

But  before  turning  to  that  chapter,  we  must 
look  back  to  New  England  once  more  and  observe 
the  blossoming-time  of  its  ancient  commonwealths. 
During  the  thirty  years  preceding  the  Civil  War 
New  England  awoke  to  a  new  life  of  the  spirit. 
So  varied  and  rich  was  her  literary  productiveness 
in  this  era  that  it  still  remains  her  greatest  period, 
and  so  completely  did  New  England  writers  of  this 
epoch  voice  the  ideals  of  the  nation  that  the  great 
majority  of  Americans,  even  today,  regard  these 
New  Englanders  as  the  truest  literary  exponents 
of  the  mind  and  soul  of  the  United  States.  We 
must  take  a  look  at  them. 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE   TRANSCENDENTALISTS 

To  understand  the  literary  leadership  of  New 
England  during  the  thirty  years  immediately 
preceding  the  Civil  War  it  is  necessary  to  recall  the 
characteristics  of  a  somewhat  isolated  and  pecu 
liar  people.  The  mental  and  moral  traits  of  the 
New  England  colonists,  already  glanced  at  in  an 
earlier  chapter,  had  suffered  little  essential  modifi 
cation  in  two  hundred  years.  The  original  racial 
stock  was  still  dominant.  As  compared  with  the 
middle  and  southern  colonies,  there  was  relatively 
little  immigration,  and  this  was  easily  assimilated. 
The  physical  remoteness  of  New  England  from 
other  sections  of  the  country,  a"nd  the  stubborn 
loyalty  with  which  its  inhabitants  maintained 
their  own  standards  of  life,  alike  contributed  to 
their  sense  of  separateness.  It  is  true,  of  course, 
that  their  mode  of  thinking  and  feeling  had  under 
gone  certain  changes.  They  were  among  the 

109 


110   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

earliest  theorists  of  political  independence  from 
Great  Britain,  and  had  done  their  share,  and  more, 
in  the  Revolution.  The  rigors  of  their  early  creed 
had  somewhat  relaxed,  as  we  have  seen,  by  the 
end  of  the  seventeenth  century,  and  throughout  the 
eighteenth  there  was  a  gradual  progress  toward 
religious  liberalism.  The  population  steadily  in 
creased,  and  New  England's  unremitting  struggle 
with  a  not  too  friendly  soil,  her  hardihood  upon  the 
seas,  and  her  keenness  in  trade,  became  proverbial 
throughout  the  country.  Her  seaport  towns  were 
wealthy.  The  general  standards  of  living  re 
mained  frugal,  but  extreme  poverty  twas  rare. 
Her  people  still  made,  as  in  the  earliest  days  of 
the  colonies,  silent  and  unquestioned  sacrifices 
for  education,  and  her  chief  seats  of  learning, 
Harvard  and  Yale,  remained  the  foremost  educa 
tional  centers  of  America.  But  there  was  still 
scant  leisure  for  the  quest  of  beauty,  and  slender 
material  reward  for  any  practitioner  of  the  fine 
arts.  Oratory  alone,  among  the  arts  of  expression, 
commanded  popular  interest  and  applause.  Dan 
iel  Webster's  audiences  at  Plymouth  in  1820  and 
at  Bunker  Hill  in  1825  were  not  inferior  to  similar 
audiences  of  today  in  intelligence  and  in  respon 
siveness.  Perhaps  they  were  superior.  Appreci- 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS  111 

ation  of  the  -spoken  word  was  natural  to  men 
trained  by  generations  of  thoughtful  listening  to 
"painful"  preaching  and  by  participation  in  the 
discussions  of  town-meeting.  Yet  appreciation 
of  secular  literature  was  rare,  and  interest  in  the 
other  arts  was  almost  non-existent. 

Then,  beginning  in  the  eighteen-twenties,  and 
developing  rapidly  after  1830,  came  a  change,  a 
change  so  startling  as  to  warrant  the  term  of  "the 
Renascence  of  New  England."  No  single  cause  is 
sufficient  to  account  for  this  "new  birth. "  It  is  a 
good  illustration  of  that  law  of  "tension  and  re 
lease,"  which  the  late  Professor  Shaler  liked  to 
demonstrate  in  all  organic  life.  A  long  period  of 
strain  was  followed  by  an  age  of  expansion,  free 
dom,  release  of  energy.  As  far  as  the  mental  life 
of  New  England  was  concerned,  something  of  the 
new  stimulus  was  due  directly  to  the  influence  of 
Europe.  Just  as  the  wandering  scholars  from 
Italy  had  brought  the  New  Learning,  which  was  a 
revival  of  the  old  learning,  into'  England  in  the 
sixteenth  century,  so  now  young  New  England 
college  men  like  Edward  Everett  and  George  Tick- 
nor  brought  home  from  the  Continent  the  riches 
of  German  and  French  scholarship.  Emerson's 
description  of  the  impression  made  by  Everett's 


112   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

lectures  in  1820,  after  his  return  from  Germany, 
gives  a  vivid  picture  of  the  new  thirst  for  foreign 
culture.  The  North  American  Review  and  other 
periodicals,  while  persistently  urging  the  need  of  a 
distinctively  national  literature,  insisted  also  upon 
the  value  of  a  deeper  knowledge  of  the  literature  of 
the  Continent.  This  was  the  burden  of  Channing's 
once  famous  article  on  A  National  Literature  in 
1823:  it  was  a  plea  for  an  independent  American 
school  of  writers,  but  these  writers  should  know  the 
best  that  Europe  had  to  teach. 

The  purely  literary  movement  was  connected, 
as  the  great  name  of  Channing  suggests,  with  a 
new  sense  of  freedom  in  philosophvtand  religion. 
Calvinism  had  mainly  done  its  worl:  in  New  Eng 
land.  It  had  bred  an  extraordinary  type  of  men 
and  women,  it  had  helped  to  lay  some  of  the  per 
manent  foundations  of  our  democracy,  and  it  was 
still  destined  to  have  a  long  life  in  the  new  West 
and  in  the  South.  But  in  that  stern  section  of  the 
country  where  its  influence  had  been  most  marked 
there  was  now  an  increasingly  sharp  reaction 
against  its  determinism  and  its  pessimism.  Early 
in  the  nineteenth  century  the  most  ancient  and 
influential  churches  in  Boston  and  the  leading 
professors  at  Harvard  had  accepted  the  new  form 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          113 

of  religious  liberalism  known  as  Unitarianism. 
The  movement  spread  throughout  Eastern  Massa 
chusetts  and  made  its  way  to  other  States.  Or 
thodox  and  liberal  Congregational  churches  split 
apart,  and  when  Channing  preached  the  ordina 
tion  sermon  for  Jared  Sparks  in  Baltimore  in  1819, 
the  word  Unitarian,  accepted  by  the  liberals  with 
some  misgiving,  became  the  recognized  motto 
of  the  new  creed.  It  is  only  with  its  literary 
influence  that  we  are  here  concerned,  yet  that 
literary  influence  became  so  potent  that  there  is 
scarcely  a  New  England  writer  of  the  first  rank, 
from  Bryant  onward,  who  remained  untouched 
by  it. 

The  most  interesting  and  peculiar  phase  of  the 
new  liberalism  has  little  directly  to  do  with  the 
specific  tenets  of  theological  Unitarianism,  and  in 
fact  marked  a  revolt  against  the  more  prosaic  and 
conventional  pattern  of  English  and  American 
Unitarian  thought.  But  this  movement,  known 
as  Transcendentalism,  would  have  been  impossible 
without  a  preliminary  and  liberalizing  stirring  of 
the  soil.  It  was  a  fascinating  moment  of  released 
for  some  of  the  most  brilliant  and  radical  minds  of 
New  England.  Its  foremost  representative  in  our 
literature  was  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  as  its  chief 


114   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

exponents  in  England  were  Coleridge  and  Carlyle. 
We  must  understand  its  meaning  if  we  would  per 
ceive  the  quality  of  much  of  the  most  noble  and 
beautiful  writing  produced  in  New  England  during 
the  Golden  Age. 

What  then  is  the  significance  of  the  word  Tran 
scendental?  Disregarding  for  the  moment  the 
technical  development  of  this  term  as  used  by 
German  and  English  philosophers,  it  meant  for 
Emerson  and  his  friends  simply  this:  whatever 
transcends  or  goes  beyond  the  experience  of  the 
senses.  It  stressed  intuition  rather  than  sensa 
tion,  direct  perception  of  ultimate  truth  rather 
than  the  processes  of  logic.  It  believed  in  man's 
ability  to  apprehend  the  absolute  ideas  of  Truth, 
Rectitude,  Goodness.  It  resembled  the  Inner 
Light  of  the  Quaker,  though  the  Quaker  traced 
this  to  a  supernatural  illumination  of  the  Holy 
Spirit,  while  the  Transcendentalist  believed  that  a 
vision  of  the  eternal  realities  was  a  natural  en 
dowment  of  the  human  mind.  It  had  only  to  be 
trusted.  Stated  in  this  form,  it  is  evident  that 
we  have  here  a  very  ancient  doctrine,  well  known 
in  the  literature  of  India  and  of  Greece.  It  has 
been  held  by  countless  persons  who  have  never 
heard  of  the  word  Transcendentalism.  We  need 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          115 

go  no  further  back  than  Alexander  Pope,  a  Roman 
Catholic,  whom  we  find  declaring:  "I  am  so  cer 
tain  of  the  soul's  being  immortal  that  I  seem  to 
feel  it  within  me,  as  it  were  by  intuition. "  Pope's 
friend  Swift,  a  dean  of  the  Church  of  England  and 
assuredly  no  Transcendentalist,  defined  vision  as 
seeing  the  things  that  are  invisible. 

Now  turn  to  some  of  the  New  England  men. 
Dr.  C.  A.  Bartol,  a  disciple  of  Emerson,  maintained 
that  "the  mistake  is  to  make  the  everlasting  things 
subjects  of  argument  instead  of  sight. "  Theodore 
Parker  declared  to  his  congregation: 

From  the  primitive  facts  of  consciousness  given  by  the 
power  of  instinctive  intuition,  I  endeavored  to  deduce 
the  true  notion  of  God,  of  justice  and  futurity.  ...  I 
found  most  help  in  the  works  of  Immanuel  Kant,  one 
of  the  profoundest  thinkers  of  the  world,  though  one 
of  the  worst  writers,  even  in  Germany;  if  he  did  not 
always  furnish  conclusions  I  could  rest  in,  he  yet  gave 
me  the  true  method,  and  put  me  on  the  right  road.  I 
found  certain  great  primal  Intuitions  of  Human  Na 
ture,  which  depend  on  no  logical  process  of  demonstra 
tion,  but  are  rather  facts  of  consciousness  given  by 
the  instinctive  action  of  human  nature  itself.  I  will 
mention  only  the  three  most  important  which  per 
tain  to  Religion.  1.  The  Instinctive  Intuition  of  the 
Divine,  the  consciousness  that  there  is  a  God.  2. 
The  Instinctive  Intuition  of  the  Just  and  Right,  a 
consciousness  that  there  is  a  Moral  Law,  independent 


116   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

of  our  will,  which  we  ought  to  keep.  3.  The  In 
stinctive  Intuition  of  the  Immortal,  a  consciousness 
that  the  Essential  Element  of  man,  the  principle  of 
Individuality,  never  dies. 

This  passage  dates  from  1859,  and  readers  of 
Bergson  may  like  to  compare  it  with  the  contem 
porary  Frenchman's  saying:  "The  analytical  facul 
ties  can  give  us  no  realities. " 

Let  us  next  hear  Emerson  himself,  first  in  an 
early  letter  to  his  brother  Edward:  "Do  you 
draw  the  distinction  of  Milton,  Coleridge,  and  the 
Germans  between  Reason  and  Understanding?  I 
think  it  a  philosophy  itself,  and,  like  all  truth,  very 
practical.  Reason  is  the  highest  faculty  of  the  soul, 
what  we  mean  often  by  the  soul  itself:  it  never  rea 
sons,  never  proves,  it  simply  perceives,  it  is  vision. 
The  understanding  toils  all  the  time,  compares, 
contrives,  adds,  argues;  near-sighted,  but  strong- 
sighted,  dwelling  in  the  present,  the  expedient,  the 
customary."  And  in  1833,  after  he  had  left  the 
Unitarian  pulpit,  Emerson  made  in  his  diary  this 
curious  attempt  to  reconcile  the  scriptural  lan 
guage  of  his  ancestral  profession  to  the  new  vocab 
ulary  of  Transcendentalism:  "Jesus  Christ  was  a 
minister  of  the  pure  Reason.  The  beatitudes  of 
the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  are  all  utterances  of  the 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          117 

mind  contemning  the  phenomenal  world.  .  .  . 
The  understanding  can  make  nothing  of  it.  'Tis 
all  nonsense.  The  Reason  affirms  its  absolute 
verity.  ...  St.  Paul  marks  the  distinction 
by  the  terms  natural  man  and  spiritual  man. 
When  Novalis  says,  'It  is  the  instinct  of  the  Un 
derstanding  to  contradict  the  Reason,'  he  only 
translates  into  a  scientific  formula  the  doctrine  of 
St.  Paul,  'The  Carnal  Mind  is  enmity  against 
God/" 

One  more  quotation  must  suffice.  It  is  from  a 
poem  by  a  forgotten  Transcendentalist,  F.  G. 
Tuckerman. 

No  more  thy  meaning  seek,  thine  anguish  plead; 
But,  leaving  straining  thought  and  stammering  word, 
Across  the  barren  azure  pass  to  God; 
Shooting  the  void  in  silence,  like  a  bird — 
A  bird  that  shuts  his  wings  for  better  speed ! 

It  is  obvious  that  this  "contemning  the  phe 
nomenal  world,"  this  "revulsion  against  the 
intellect  as  the  sole  source  of  truth,"  is  highly  dan 
gerous  to  second-class  minds.  If  one  habitually 
prints  the  words  Insight,  Instinct,  Intuition,  Con 
sciousness  with  capitals,  and  relegates  equally 
useful  words  like  senses,  experience,  fact,  logic  to 
lower-case  type,  one  may  do  it  because  he  is  a 


118  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Carlyle  or  an  Emerson,  but  the  chances  are  that 
he  is  neither.  Transcendentalism,  like  all  ideal 
istic  movements,  had  its  "lunatic  fringe,"  its 
camp-followers  of  excitable,  unstable  visionaries. 
The  very  name,  like  the  name  Methodist,  was 
probably  bestowed  upon  it  in  mockery,  and  this 
whole  perturbation  of  staid  New  England  had  its 
humorous  side.  Witness  the  career  of  Bronson 
Alcott.  It  is  also  true  that  the  glorious  affirma 
tions  of  these  seers  can  be  neither  proved  nor  dis 
proved.  They  made  no  examination  and  they 
sought  no  validation  of  consciousness.  An  ex 
plorer  in  search  of  the  North  Pole  must  bring  back 
proofs  of  his  journey,  but  when  a  Transcendental- 
ist  affirms  that  he  has  reached  the  far  heights  of 
human  experience  and  even  caught  sight  of  the 
gods  sitting  on  their  thrones,  you  and  I  are  obliged 
to  take  his  word  for  it.  Sometimes  we  hear  such 
a  man  gladly,  but  it  depends  upon  the  man,  not 
upon  the  trustworthiness  of  the  method.  Finally 
it  should  be  observed  that  the  Transcendental 
movement  was  an  exceedingly  complex  one,  being 
both  literary,  philosophic,  and  religious;  related 
also  to  the  subtle  thought  of  the  Orient,  to 
mediaeval  mysticism,  and  to  the  English  Plato- 
nists;  touched  throughout  by  the  French  Revolu- 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS  119 

tionary  theories,  by  the  Romantic  spirit,  by  the 
new  zeal  for  science  and  pseudo-science,  and  by 
the  unrest  of  a  fermenting  age. 

Our  present  concern  is  with  the  impact  of  this 
cosmopolitan  current  upon  the  mind  and  character 
of  a  few  New  England  writers.  Channing  and 
Theodore  Parker,  Margaret  Fuller  and  Alcott, 
Thoreau  and  Emerson,  are  all  representative  of  the 
best  thought  and  the  noblest  ethical  impulses  of 
their  generation.  Let  us  choose  first  the  greatest 
name :  a  sunward-gazing  spirit,  and,  it  may  be,  one 
of  the  very  Sun-Gods. 

The  pilgrim  to  Concord  who  stops  for  a  moment 
in  the  village  library  to  study  French's  statue  of 
Emerson  will  notice  the  asymmetrical  face.  On 
one  side  it  is  the  face  of  a  keen  Yankee  farmer,  but 
seen  from  the  other  side  it  is  the  countenance  of  a 
seer,  a  world's  man.  This  contrast  between  the 
parochial  Emerson  and  the  greater  Emerson  inter 
prets  many  a  puzzle  in  his  career.  Half  a  mile 
beyond  the  village  green  to  the  north,  close  to  the 
"rude  bridge"  of  the  famous  Concord  fight  in 
1775,  is  the  Old  Manse,  once  tenanted  and  de 
scribed  by  Hawthorne.  It  was  built  by  Emerson's 
grandfather,  a  patriot  chaplain  in  the  Revolution, 
who  died  of  camp-fever  at  Ticonderoga.  His 


120  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

widow  married  Dr.  Ezra  Ripley,  and  here  Ralph 
Waldo  Emerson  and  his  brothers  passed  many  a 
summer  in  their  childhood.  Half  a  mile  east  of 
the  village,  on  the  Cambridge  turnpike,  is  Emer 
son's  own  house,  still  sheltered  by  the  pines  which 
Thoreau  helped  him  to  plant  in  1838.  Within 
the  house  everything  is  unchanged:  here  are 
the  worn  books,  pen  and  inkstand,  the  favorite 
pictures  upon  the  wall.  Over  the  ridge  to  the 
north  lies  the  Sleepy  Hollow  cemetery  where  the 
poet  rests,  with  the  gravestones  of  Hawthorne 
and  the  Alcotts,  Thoreau  and  William  James 
close  by. 

But  although  Concord  is  the  Emerson  shrine, 
he  was  born  in  Boston,  in  1803.  His  father,  named 
William  like  the  grandfather,  was  also,  like  the 
Emerson  ancestors  for  many  generations,  a  clergy 
man  —  eloquent,  liberal,  fond  of  books  and  music, 
highly  honored  by  his  alma  mater  Harvard  and  by 
the  town  of  Boston,  where  he  ministered  to  the 
First  Church.  His  premature  death  in  1811  left 
his  widow  with  five  sons  —  one  of  them  feeble 
minded —  and  a  daughter  to  struggle  hard  with 
poverty.  With  her  husband's  sister,  the  Calvin- 
istic  "Aunt  Mary  Moody"  Emerson,  she  held, 
however,  that  these  orphaned  boys  had  been 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          121 

"  born  to  be  educated. "  And  educated  the  "  eager 
blushing  boys"  were,  at  the  Boston  Latin  School 
and  at  Harvard  College,  on  a  regimen  of  "toil 
and  want  and  truth  and  mutual  faith."  There 
are  many  worse  systems  of  pedagogy  than  this. 
Ralph  was  thought  less  persistent  than  his  steady 
older  brother  William,  and  far  less  brilliant  than 
his  gifted,  short-lived  younger  brothers,  Edward 
and  Charles.  He  had  an  undistinguished  career 
at  Harvard,  where  he  was  graduated  in  1821, 
ranking  thirtieth  in  a  class  of  fifty-nine.  Lovers 
of  irony  like  to  remember  that  he  was  the  seventh 
choice  of  his  classmates  for  the  position  of  class 
poet.  After  some  desultory  teaching  to  help  his 
brothers,  he  passed  irregularly  through  the  Di 
vinity  School,  his  studies  often  interrupted  by  se 
rious  ill-health.  "If  they  had  examined  me,"  he 
said  afterward  of  the  kindly  professors  in  the 
Divinity  School,  "they  never  would  have  passed 
me."  But  approve  him  they  did,  in  1826,  and 
he  entered  decorously  upon  the  profession  of  his 
ancestors,  as  associate  minister  of  the  Second 
Church  in  Boston.  His  Journals,  which  are  a 
priceless  record  of  his  inner  life,  at  this  and  later 
periods,  reveal  the  rigid  self-scrutiny,  the  tender 
idealism,  with  which  he  began  his  ministerial  career. 


122  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

But  as  a  scheme  of  life  for  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson 
this  vocation  would  not  satisfy.  The  sexton  of 
the  Second  Church  thought  that  the  young  man 
was  not  at  his  best  at  funerals.  Father  Taylor, 
the  eccentric  Methodist,  whom  Emerson  assisted 
at  a  sailor's  Bethel  near  Long  Wharf,  considered 
him  "one  of  the  sweetest  souls  God  ever  made," 
but  as  ignorant  of  the  principles  of  the  New  Testa 
ment  as  Balaam's  ass  was  of  Hebrew  grammar. 
By  and  by  came  an  open  difference  with  his  con 
gregation  over  the  question  of  administering  the 
Communion.  "I  am  not  interested  in  it,"  Emer 
son  admitted,  and  he  wrote  in  his  Journal  the 
noble  words:  "It  is  my  desire,  in  the  office  of  a 
Christian  minister,  to  do  nothing  which  I  cannot 
do  with  my  whole  heart."  His  resignation  was 
accepted  in  1832.  His  young  wife  had  died  of  con 
sumption  in  the  same  year.  He  now  sailed  for 
Italy,  France,  and  England,  a  memorable  journey 
which  gave  him  an  acquaintance  with  Landor, 
Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  and  Carlyle,  but  which 
was  even  more  significant  in  sending  him,  as  he 
says,  back  to  himself,  to  the  resources  of  his  own 
nature.  "When  shows  break  up,"  wrote  WThit- 
man  afterward,  "what  but  oneself  is  sure?"  In 
1834  and  1835  we  find  Emerson  occupying  a  room 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS  123 

in  the  Old  Manse  at  Concord,  strolling  in  the  quiet 
fields,  lecturing  or  preaching  if  he  were  invited  to 
do  so,  but  chiefly  absorbed  in  a  little  book  which  he 
was  beginning  to  write  —  a  new  utterance  of  a  new 
man. 

This  book,  the  now  famous  Nature  of  1836,  con 
tains  the  essence  of  Emerson's  message  to  his 
generation.  It  is  a  prose  essay,  but  written  in  the 
ecstatic  mood  of  a  poet.  The  theme  of  its  medita 
tion  is  the  soul  as  related  to  Nature  and  to  God. 
The  soul  is  primal;  Nature,  in  all  its  bountiful  and 
beautiful  commodities,  exists  for  the  training  of  the 
soul;  it  is  the  soul's  shadow.  And  every  soul  has 
immediate  access  to  Deity.  Thus  the  utility  and 
beauty  and  discipline  of  Nature  lift  the  soul  God- 
ward.  The  typical  sentence  of  the  book  is  this: 
"The  sun  shines  today  also";  that  is  to  say:  the 
world  is  still  alive  and  fair;  let  us  lift  up  our  hearts! 
Only  a  few  Americans  of  1836  bought  this  singular 
volume,  but  Emerson  went  serenely  forward.  He 
had  found  his  path. 

In  1837  he  delivered  the  well-known  Phi  Beta 
Kappa  oration  at  Harvard  on  The  American 
Scholar.  Emerson  was  now  thirty -four;  he  had 
married  a  second  time,  had  bought  a  house  of  his 
own  in  Concord,  and  purposed  to  make  a  living  by 


124   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

lecturing  and  writing.  His  address  in  Cambridge, 
though  it  contained  no  reference  to  himself,  was 
after  all  a  justification  of  the  way  of  life  he  had 
chosen:  a  declaration  of  intellectual  independence 
for  himself  and  his  countrymen,  an  exhortation  of 
self -trust  to  the  individual  thinking  man.  "If 
the  single  man  plant  himself  indomitably  on  his 
instincts  and  there  abide,  the  huge  world  will  come 
round  to  him. "  Such  advice  to  cut  loose  from  the 
moorings  of  the  past  was  not  unknown  in  Phi  Beta 
Kappa  orations,  though  it  had  never  been  so  bril 
liantly  phrased;  but  when  Emerson  applied  pre 
cisely  the  same  doctrine,  in  1838,  to  the  graduating 
class  at  the  Harvard  Divinity  School,  he  roused  a 
storm  of  disapproval.  "A  tempest  in  our  wash 
bowl,  "  he  wrote  coolly  to  Carlyle,  but  it  was  more 
than  that.  The  great  sentence  of  the  Divinity 
School  address,  "God  is,  not  was;  he  speaketh,  not 
spake,"  was  the  emphasis  of  a  superb  rhetorician 
upon  the  immediacy  of  the  soul's  access  to  God. 
It  has  been  the  burden  of  a  thousand  prophets  in 
all  religions.  The  young  priests  of  the  Divinity 
School,  their  eyes  wearied  with  Hebrew  and 
Greek,  seem  to  have  enjoyed  Emerson's  injunction 
to  turn  away  from  past  records  and  historical 
authorities  and  to  drink  from  the  living  fountain 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS  125 

of  the  divine  within  themselves;  but  to  the  pro 
fessors,  "the  stern  old  war-gods,"  this  relative 
belittlement  of  historical  Christianity  seemed  blas 
phemy.  A  generation  passed  before  Emerson  was 
again  welcomed  by  his  alma  mater. 

The  reader  who  has  mastered  those  three  utter 
ances  by  the  Concord  Transcendentalist  in  1836, 
1837,  and  1838  has  the  key  to  Emerson.  He  was 
a  seer,  not  a  system-maker.  The  constitution  of 
his  mind  forbade  formal,  consecutive,  logical 
thought.  He  was  not  a  philosopher  in  the  ac 
cepted  sense,  though  he  was  always  philosophizing, 
nor  a  metaphysician  in  spite  of  his  curious  search- 
ings  in  the  realm  of  metaphysics.  He  sauntered 
in  books  as  he  sauntered  by  Walden  Pond,  in 
quest  of  what  interested  him;  he  "fished  in  Mon 
taigne,"  he  said,  as  he  fished  in  Plato  and  Goethe. 
He  basketed  the  day's  luck,  good  or  bad  as  it  might 
be,  into  the  pages  of  his  private  Journal,  which  he 
called  his  savings-bank,  because  from  this  source 
he  drew  most  of  the  material  for  his  books.  The 
Journal  has  recently  been  printed,  ii\  ten  volumes. 
No  American  writing  rewards  the  reader  more 
richly.  It  must  be  remembered  that  Emerson's 
Essays,  the  first  volume  of  which  appeared  in  1841, 
and  the  last  volumes  after  his  death  in  1882,  re- 


126   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

present  practically  three  stages  of  composition: 
first  the  detached  thoughts  of  the  Journal;  second, 
the  rearrangement  of  this  material  for  use  upon  the 
lecture  platform;  and  finally,  the  essays  in  their 
present  form.  The  oral  method  thus  predominates : 
a  series  of  oracular  thoughts  has  been  shaped  for 
oratorical  utterance,  not  oratorical  in  the  bom 
bastic,  popular  American  sense,  but  cunningly 
designed,  by  a  master  of  rhetoric,  to  capture  the 
ear  and  then  the  mind  of  the  auditor. 

Emerson's  work  as  a  lecturer  coincided  with  the 
rise  of  that  Lyceum  system  which  brought  most  of 
the  American  authors,  for  more  than  a  generation, 
into  intimate  contact  with  the  public,  and  which 
proved  an  important  factor  in  the  aesthetic  and 
moral  cultivation  of  our  people.  No  lecturer 
could  have  had  a  more  auspicious  influence  than 
Emerson,  with  his  quiet  dignity,  his  serene  spiritual 
presence,  his  tonic  and  often  electrifying  force. 
But  if  he  gave  his  audiences  precious  gifts,  he  also 
learned  much  from  them.  For  thirty  years  his 
lecturing  trips  to  the  West  brought  him,  more 
widely  than  any  New  England  man  of  letters, 
into  contact  with  the  new,  virile  America  of  the 
great  Mississippi  valley.  Unlike  many  of  his 
friends,  he  was  not  repelled  by  the  "  Jacksonism  of 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          127 

the  West";  he  rated  it  a  wholesome,  vivifying  force 
in  our  national  thought  and  life.  The  Journal 
reveals  the  essential  soundness  of  his  Americanism. 
Though  surrounded  all  his  life  by  reformers,  he 
was  himself  scarcely  a  reformer,  save  upon  the 
single  issue  of  anti-slavery.  Perhaps  he  was  at 
bottom  too  much  of  a  radical  to  be  swept  off  his 
feet  by  any  reform. 

To  our  generation,  of  course,  Emerson  presents 
himself  as  an  author  of  books,  and  primarily  as 
an  essayist,  rather  than  as  a  winning,  entrancing 
speaker.  His  essays  have  a  greater  variety  of  tone 
than  is  commonly  recognized.  Many  of  them,  like 
Manners,  Farming,  Books,  Eloquence,  Old  Age,  ex 
hibit  a  shrewd  prudential  wisdom,  a  sort  of  Yankee 
instinct  for  "the  milk  in  the  pan,"  that  reminds 
one  of  Ben  Franklin.  Like  most  of  the  greater 
New  England  writers,  he  could  be,  on  occasion,  an 
admirable  local  historian.  See  his  essays  on  Life 
and  Letters  in  New  England,  New  England  Reform 
ers,  Politics,  and  the  successive  entries  in  his 
Journal  relating  to  Daniel  Webster.  He  had  the 
happiest  gift  of  portraiture,  as  is  witnessed  by  his 
sketches  of  Montaigne,  of  Napoleon,  of  Socrates 
(in  the  essay  on  Plato),  of  his  aunt  Mary  Moody 
Emerson,  of  Thoreau,  and  of  various  types  of 


128   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Englishmen  in  his  English  Traits.  But  the  great 
essays,  no  doubt,  are  those  like  Self-Reliance, 
Compensation,  The  Over-Soul,  Fate,  Power,  Culture, 
Worship,  and  Illusions.  These  will  puzzle  no  one 
who  has  read  carefully  that  first  book  on  Nature. 
They  all  preach  the  gospel  of  intuition,  instinctive 
trust  in  the  Universe,  faith  in  the  ecstatic  moment 
of  vision  into  the  things  that  are  unseen  by  the 
physical  eye.  Self-reliance,  as  Emerson's  son 
has  pointed  out,  means  really  God-reliance;  the 
Over-Soul  —  always  a  stumbling-block  to  Philis 
tines —  means  that  high  spiritual  life  into  which 
all  men  may  enter  and  in  which  they  share  the 
life  of  Deity.  Emerson  is  stern  enough  in  ex 
pounding  the  laws  of  compensation  that  run 
through  the  universe,  but  to  him  the  chief  law  is 
the  law  of  the  ever-ascending,  victorious  soul. 

This  radiant  optimism  permeates  his  poems. 
By  temperament  a  singer  as  well  as  a  seer  and 
sayer,  Emerson  was  nevertheless  deficient  in  the 
singing  voice.  He  composed  no  one  great  poem, 
his  verse  presents  no  ideas  that  are  not  found  in  his 
prose.  In  metre  and  rhyme  he  is  harsh  and  willful. 
Yet  he  has  marvelous  single  phrases  and  cadences. 
He  ejaculates  transports  and  ecstasies,  and  though 
he  cannot  organize  and  construct  in  verse,  he  is 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          129 

capable  here  and  there  of  the  true  miracle  of 
transforming  fact  and  thought  into  true  beauty. 
Aldrich  used  to  say  that  he  would  rather  have 
written  Emerson's  Bacchus  than  any  American 
poem. 

That  the  pure,  high,  and  tonic  mind  of  Emerson 
was  universal  in  its  survey  of  human  forces,  no 
one  would  claim.  Certain  limitations  in  interest 
and  sympathy  are  obvious.  "That  horrid  burden 
and  impediment  of  the  soul  which  the  churches  call 
sin,"  to  use  John  Morley's  words,  occupied  his 
attention  but  little.  Like  a  mountain  climber  in  a 
perilous  pass,  he  preferred  to  look  up  rather  than 
down.  He  does  not  stress  particularly  those  old 
human  words,  service  and  sacrifice.  "Anti-scien 
tific,  anti-social,  anti-Christian"  are  the  terms  ap 
plied  to  him  by  one  of  his  most  penetrating  critics. 
Yet  I  should  prefer  to  say  "un-scientific,"  "un 
social,"  and  "non-Christian,"  in  the  sense  in  which 
Plato  and  Isaiah  are  non-Christian.  Perhaps  it 
would  be  still  nearer  the  truth  to  say,  as  Mrs. 
Lincoln  said  of  her  husband,  "He  was  not  a  tech 
nical  Christian."  He  tends  to  underestimate 
institutions  of  every  kind;  history,  except  as  a  store 
house  of  anecdote,  and  culture  as  a  steady  mental 
discipline.  This  is  the  price  he  pays  for  his  tran- 


130  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

scendental  insistence  upon  the  supreme  value  of  the 
Now,  the  moment  of  insight.  But  after  all  these 
limitations  are  properly  set  down,  the  personality 
of  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson  remains  a  priceless  pos 
session  to  his  countrymen.  The  austere  serenity 
of  his  life,  and  the  perfection  with  which  he  repre 
sents  the  highest  type  of  his  province  and  his  era, 
will  ultimately  become  blended  with  the  thought 
of  his  true  Americanism.  A  democrat  and  libera 
tor,  like  Lincoln,  he  seems  also  destined  like  Lin 
coln  to  become  increasingly  a  world's  figure,  a 
friend  and  guide  to  aspiring  spirits  everywhere. 
Differences  of  race  and  creed  are  negligible  in  the 
presence  of  such  superb  confidence  in  God  and  the 
soul. 

Citizens  of  Concord  in  May,  1862,  hearing  that 
Henry  Thoreau,  the  eccentric  bachelor,  had  just 
died  of  consumption  in  his  mother's  house  on  Main 
Street,  in  his  forty-fifth  year,  would  have  smiled 
cannily  at  the  notion  that  after  fifty  years  their 
townsman's  literary  works  would  be  published  in  a 
sumptuous  twenty -volume  edition,  and  that  critics 
in  his  own  country  and  in  Europe  would  rank  him 
with  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson.  Yet  that  is  precisely 
what  has  happened.  Our  literature  has  no  more 
curious  story  than  the  evolution  of  this  local  crank 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          131 

into  his  rightful  place  of  mastership.  In  his  life 
time  he  printed  only  two  books,  A  Week  on  the 
Concord  and  Merrimac  Rivers  —  which  was  even 
more  completely  neglected  by  the  public  than 
Emerson's  Nature  —  and  W olden,  now  one  of  the 
classics,  but  only  beginning  to  be  talked  about 
when  its  shy,  proud  author  penned  his  last  line 
and  died  with  the  words  "moose"  and  "Indian" 
on  his  lips. 

Thoreau,  like  all  thinkers  who  reach  below  the 
surface  of  human  life,  means  many  different  things 
to  men  of  various  temperaments.  Collectors  of  hu 
man  novelties,  like  Stevenson,  rejoice  in  his  unique 
ness  of  flavor;  critics,  like  Lowell,  place  him,  not 
without  impatient  rigor.  To  some  readers  he  is 
primarily  a  naturalist,  an  observer,  of  the  White 
of  Selborne  school;  to  others  an  elemental  man,  a 
lover  of  the  wild,  a  hermit  of  the  woods.  He  has 
been  called  the  poet-naturalist,  to  indicate  that  his 
powers  of  observation  were  accompanied,  like 
Wordsworth's,  by  a  gift  of  emotional  interpreta 
tion  of  the  meaning  of  phenomena.  Lovers  of 
literature  celebrate  his  sheer  force  and  penetration 
of  phrase.  But  to  the  student  of  American 
thought  Thoreau's  prime  value  lies  in  the  courage 
and  consistency  with  which  he  endeavored  to 


132  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

realize  the  gospel  of  Transcendentalism  in  his 
own  inner  life. 

Lovers  of  racial  traits  like  to  remember  that 
Thoreau's  grandfather  was  an  immigrant  French 
man  from  the  island  of  Jersey,  and  that  his  grand 
mother  was  Scotch  and  Quaker.  His  father  made 
lead  pencils  and  ground  plumbago  in  his  own  house 
in  Concord.  The  mother  was  from  New  Hamp 
shire.  It  was  a  high-minded  family.  All  the 
four  children  taught  school  and  were  good  talkers. 
Henry,  born  in  1817,  was  duly  baptized  by  good 
Dr.  Ripley  of  the  Old  Manse,  studied  Greek  and 
Latin,  and  was  graduated  at  Harvard  in  1837,  the 
year  of  Emerson's  Phi  Beta  Kappa  address. 
Even  in  college  the  young  man  was  a  trifle  difficult. 
"Cold  and  unimpressible, "  wrote  a  classmate. 
"The  touch  of  his  hand  was  moist  and  indifferent. 
He  did  not  care  for  people."  "An  unfavorable 
opinion  has  been  entertained  of  his  disposition  to 
exert  himself,"  wrote  President  Quincy  confi 
dentially  to  Emerson  in  1837,  although  the  kindly 
President,  a  year  later,  in  recommending  Thoreau  as 
a  school-teacher,  certified  that  "his  rank  was  high 
as  a  scholar  in  all  the  branches  and  his  morals  and 
general  conduct  unexceptionable  and  exemplary. " 

Ten  years  passed.     The  young  man  gave  up 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS  133 

school-keeping,  thinking  it  a  loss  of  time.  He 
learned  pencil-making,  surveying,  and  farm  work, 
and  found  that  by  manual  labor  for  six  weeks  in  the 
year  he  could  meet  all  the  expenses  of  living.  He 
haunted  the  woods  and  pastures,  explored  rivers 
and  ponds,  built  the  famous  hut  on  Emerson's 
wood-lot  with  the  famous  axe  borrowed  from  Al- 
cott,  was  put  in  jail  for  refusal  to  pay  his  poll- 
tax,  and,  to  sum  up  much  in  little,  "signed  off" 
from  social  obligations.  "I,  Henry  D.  Thoreau, 
have  signed  off,  and  do  not  hold  myself  respon 
sible  to  your  multifarious  uncivil  chaos  named  Civil 
Government."  When  his  college  class  held  its 
tenth  reunion  in  1847,  and  each  man  was  asked 
to  send  to  the  secretary  a  record  of  achievement, 
Thoreau  wrote:  "My  steadiest  employment,  if 
such  it  can  be  called,  is  to  keep  myself  at  the  top  of 
my  condition  and  ready  for  whatever  may  turn 
up  in  heaven  or  on  earth. "  There  is  the  motto  of 
Transcendentalism,  stamped  upon  a  single  coin. 

For  "to  be  ready  for  whatever  may  turn  up"  is 
Thoreau's  racier,  homelier  version  of  Emerson's 
"endless  seeker";  and  Thoreau,  more  easily  than 
Emerson,  could  venture  to  stake  everything  upon 
the  quest.  The  elder  man  had  announced  the 
programme,  but  by  1847  he  was  himself  almost 


134   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

what  Thoreau  would  call  a  "committed  man," 
with  family  and  household  responsibilities,  with 
a  living  to  earn,  and  bound,  like  every  professional 
writer  and  speaker,  to  have  some  measure  of 
regard  for  his  public.  But  Thoreau  was  ready  to 
travel  lightly  and  alone.  If  he  should  fail  in  the 
great  adventure  for  spiritual  perfection,  it  was  his 
own  affair.  He  had  no  intimates,  no  confidant 
save  the  multitudinous  pages  of  his  Journal,  from 
which  —  and  here  again  he  followed  Emerson's 
example  —  his  future  books  were  to  be  compiled. 
Many  of  his  most  loyal  admirers  will  admit  that 
such  a  quest  is  bound,  by  the  very  conditions  of  the 
problem,  to  be  futile.  Hawthorne  allegorized  it 
in  Ethan  Brand,  and  his  quaint  illustration  of  the 
folly  of  romantic  expansion  of  the  self  apart  from 
the  common  interests  of  human  kind  is  the  pic 
ture  of  a  dog  chasing  its  own  tail.  "It  is  time  now 
that  I  begin  to  live, "  notes  Thoreau  in  the  Journal, 
and  he  continued  to  say  it  in  a  hundred  different 
ways  until  the  end  of  all  his  journalizing,  but  he 
never  quite  captured  the  fugitive  felicity.  The 
haunting  pathos  of  his  own  allegory  has  moved 
every  reader  of  W olden:  "I  long  ago  lost  a  hound,  a 
bay  horse,  and  a  turtle-dove,  and  am  still  on  their 
trail. "  Precisely  what  he  meant  it  is  now  impos- 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          135 

sible  to  say,  but  surely  he  betrays  a  doubt  in  the 
ultimate  efficacy  of  his  own  system  of  life.  He 
bends  doggedly  to  the  trail,  for  Henry  Thoreau  is 
no  quitter,  but  the  trail  leads  nowhere,  and  in  the 
latest  volumes  of  the  Journals  he  seems  to  realize 
that  he  has  been  pursuing  a  phantom.  He  dived 
fearlessly  and  deep  into  himself,  but  somehow  he 
failed  to  grasp  that  pearl  of  great  price  which  all 
the  transcendental  prophets  assured  him  was  to  be 
had  at  the  cost  of  diving. 

This  is  not  to  say  that  this  austere  and  strenu 
ous  athlete  came  up  quite  empty-handed.  Far 
from  it.  The  by-products  of  his  toil  were  enough 
to  have  enriched  many  lesser  men,  and  they  have 
given  Thoreau  a  secure  fame.  From  his  boyhood  he 
longed  to  make  himself  a  writer,  and  an  admirable 
writer  he  became.  "For  a  long  time,"  he  says  hi 
Walden,  "I  was  reporter  to  a  journal,  of  no  very 
wide  circulation,  whose  editor  has  never  seen  fit 
to  print  the  bulk  of  my  contributions,  and,  as  is 
too  common  with  writers,  I  got  only  my  labor  for 
my  pains.  However,  in  this  case  my  pains  were 
their  reward."  Like  so  many  solitaries,  he  ex 
perienced  the  joy  of  intense,  long-continued  effort 
in  composition,  and  he  was  artist  enough  to  know 
that  his  pages,  carefully  assembled  from  his  note- 


136   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

books,  had  pungency,  form,  atmosphere.  No  man 
of  his  day,  not  even  Lowell  the  "last  of  the  book 
men,  "  abandoned  himself  more  unreservedly  to  the 
delight  of  reading.  Thoreau  was  an  accomplished 
scholar  in  the  Greek  and  Roman  classics,  as  his 
translations  attest.  He  had  some  acquaintance 
with  several  modern  languages,  and  at  one  time 
possessed  the  best  collection  of  books  on  Oriental 
literature  to  be  found  in  America.  He  was 
drenched  in  the  English  poetry  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  His  critical  essays  in  the  Dial,  his 
letters  and  the  bookish  allusions  throughout  his 
writings,  are  evidence  of  rich  harvesting  in  the 
records  of  the  past.  He  left  some  three  thousand 
manuscript  pages  of  notes  on  the  American  In 
dians,  whose  history  and  character  had  fascinated 
him  from  boyhood.  Even  his  antiquarian  hobbies 
gave  him  durable  satisfaction.  Then,  too,  he  had 
deep  delight  in  his  life-long  studies  in  natural 
history,  in  his  meticulous  measurements  of  river 
currents,  in  his  notes  upon  the  annual  flowering 
of  plants  and  the  migration  of  birds.  The  more 
thoroughly  trained  naturalists  of  our  own  day  de 
tect  him  now  and  again  in  error  as  to  his  birds  and 
plants,  just  as  specialists  in  Maine  woodcraft 
discover  that  he  made  amusing,  and  for  him  un- 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          137 

accountable,  blunders  when  he  climbed  Katahdin. 
But  if  he  was  not  impeccable  as  a  naturalist  or 
woodsman,  who  has  ever  had  more  fun  out  of  his 
enthusiasm  than  Thoreau,  and  who  has  ever  stimu 
lated  as  many  men  and  women  in  the  happy  use  of 
their  eyes?  He  would  have  had  slight  patience 
with  much  of  the  sentimental  nature  study  of  our 
generation,  and  certainly  an  intellectual  contempt 
for  much  that  we  read  and  write  about  the  call  of 
the  wild;  but  no  reader  of  his  books  can  escape  his 
infection  for  the  freedom  of  the  woods,  for  the 
stark  and  elemental  in  nature.  Thoreau's  passion 
for  this  aspect  of  life  may  have  been  selfish,  wolf- 
like,  but  it  is  still  communicative. 

Once,  toward  the  close  of  his  too  brief  life, 
Thoreau  "signed  on"  again  to  an  American  ideal, 
and  no  man  could  have  signed  more  nobly.  It  was 
the  cause  of  Freedom,  as  represented  by  John 
Brown  of  Harper's  Ferry.  The  French  and  Scotch 
blood  in  the  furtive  hermit  suddenly  grew  hot. 
Instead  of  renouncing  in  disgust  the  "uncivil 
chaos  called  Civil  Government,"  Thoreau  chal- , 
lenged  it  to  a  fight.  Indeed  he  had  already  thrown 
down  the  gauntlet  in  Slavery  in  Massachusetts, 
which  Garrison  had  published  in  the  Liberator  in 
1854.  And  now  the  death  upon  the  scaffold  of  the 


138   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

old  fanatic  of  Ossawatomie  changed  Thoreau  into 
a  complete  citizen,  arguing  the  case  and  glorifying 
to  his  neighbors  the  dead  hero.  "It  seems  as  if 
no  man  had  ever  died  in  America  before;  for  in 
order  to  die  you  must  first  have  lived.  ...  I 
hear  a  good  many  pretend  that  they  are  going  to 
die.  .  .  .  Nonsense!  I'll  defy  them  to  do  it. 
They  haven't  got  life  enough  in  them.  They'll 
deliquesce  like  fungi,  and  keep  a  hundred  eulogists 
mopping  the  spot  where  they  left  off.  Only  half 
a  dozen  or  so  have  died  since  the  world  began." 
Such  passages  as  this  reveal  a  very  different  Thor 
eau  from  the  Thoreau  who  is  supposed  to  have 
spent  his  days  in  the  company  of  swamp-black 
birds  and  woodchucks.  He  had,  in  fact,  one  of  the 
highest  qualifications  for  human  society,  an  abso 
lute  honesty  of  mind.  "We  select  granite,"  he 
says,  "for  the  underpinning  of  our  houses  and 
barns;  we  build  fences  of  stone;  but  we  do  not  our 
selves  rest  on  an  underpinning  of  granite  truth,  the 
lowest  primitive  rock.  Our  sills  are  rotten*-  .  .  . 
In  proportion  as  our  inward  life  IRis5  we  go 
more  constantly  and  desperately  to  the  post- 
office.  You  may  depend  upon  it,  that  the 
poor  fellow  who  walks  away  with  the  great 
est  number  of  letters,  proud  of  his  extensive 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          139 

correspondence,  has  not  heard  from  himself  this 
long  time." 

This  hard,  basic  individualism  was  for  Thoreau 
the  foundation  of  all  enduring  social  relations,  and 
the  dullest  observer  of  twentieth  century  America 
can  see  that  Thoreau 's  doctrine  is  needed  as  much 
as  ever.  His  sharp-edged  personality  provokes 
curiosity  and  pricks  the  reader  into  dissent  or  emu 
lation  as  the  case  may  be,  but  its  chief  ethical  value 
to  our  generation  lies  in  the  fact  that  here  was  a 
Transcendentalist  who  stressed,  not  the  life  of  the 
senses,  though  he  was  well  aware  of  their  seductive 
ness,  but  the  stubborn  energy  of  the  will. 

The  scope  of  the  present  book  prevents  more 
than  a  glimpse  at  the  other  members  of  the  New 
England  Transcendental  group.  They  are  a  very 
mixed  company,  noble,  whimsical,  queer,  impos 
sible.  "The  good  Alcott,"  wrote  Carlyle,  "with 
his  long,  lean  face  and  figure,  with  his  gray  worn 
temples  and  mild  radiant  eyes;  all  bent  on  saving 
the  world  by  a  return  to  acorns  and  the  golden  age; 
he  comes  before  one  like  a  venerable  Don  Quixote, 
whom  nobody  can  laugh  at  without  loving." 
These  words  paint  a  whole  company,  as  well  as  a 
single  man.  The  good  Alcott  still  awaits  an  ade 
quate  biographer.  Connecticut  Yankee,  peddler 


140  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

in  the  South,  school-teacher  in  Boston  and  else 
where,  he  descended  upon  Concord,  flitted  to  the 
queer  community  of  Fruitlands,  was  starved  back 
to  Concord,  inspired  and  bored  the  patient  Emer 
son,  talked  endlessly,  wrote  ineffective  books,  and 
had  at  last  his  apotheosis  in  the  Concord  School  of 
Philosophy,  but  was  chiefly  known  for  the  twenty 
years  before  his  death  in  1888  as  the  father  of 
the  Louisa  Alcott  who  wrote  Little  Women.  "A 
tedious  archangel,"  was  Emerson's  verdict,  and 
it  is  likely  to  stand. 

Margaret  Fuller,  though  sketched  by  Hawthorne, 
analyzed  by  Emerson,  and  painted  at  full  length 
by  Thomas  Wentworth  Higginson,  is  now  a  fading 
figure  —  a  remarkable  woman,  no  doubt,  one  of  the 
first  of  American  feminists,  suggesting  George 
Eliot  in  her  physical  unattractiveness,  her  clear 
brain,  her  touch  of  sensuousness.  She  was  an 
early-ripe,  over-crammed  scholar  in  the  classics 
and  in  modern  European  languages.  She  did 
loyal,  unpaid  work  as  the  editor  of  the  Dial,  which 
from  1840  to  1844  was  the  organ  of  Transcenden 
talism.  She  joined  the  community  at  Brook  Farm, 
whose  story  has  been  so  well  told  by  Lindsay 
Swift.  For  a  while  she  served  as  literary  editor 
of  the  New  York  Tribune  under  Horace  Greeley. 


THE  TRANSCENDENTALISTS          141 

Then  she  went  abroad,  touched  Rousseau's 
manuscripts  at  Paris  with  trembling,  adoring 
fingers,  made  a  secret  marriage  in  Italy  with  the 
young  Marquis  Ossoli,  and  perished  by  shipwreck, 
with  her  husband  and  child,  off  Fire  Island  in  1850. 

Theodore  Parker,  like  Alcott  and  "Margaret," 
an  admirable  Greek  scholar,  an  idealist  and  re 
former,  still  lives  in  Chadwick's  biography,  in 
Colonel  Higginson's  delightful  essay,  and  in  the 
memories  of  a  few  liberal  Bostonians  who  remem 
ber  his  tremendous  sermons  on  the  platform  of  the 
old  Music  Hall.  He  was  a  Lexington  farmer's 
son,  with  the  temperament  of  a  blacksmith,  with 
enormous,  restless  energy,  a  good  hater,  a  passion 
ate  lover  of  all  excellent  things  save  meekness. 
He  died  at  fifty,  worn  out,  in  Italy. 

But  while  these  three  figures  were,  after  Emer 
son  and  Thoreau,  the  most  representative  of  the 
group,  the  student  of  the  Transcendental  period 
will  be  equally  interested  in  watching  its  influence 
upon  many  other  types  of  young  men:  upon 
future  journalists  and  publicists  like  George  Wil 
liam  Curtis,  Charles  A.  Dana,  and  George  Ripley; 
upon  religionists  like  Orestes  Brownson,  Father 
Hecker,  and  James  Freeman  Clarke;  and  upon 
poets  like  Jones  Very,  Christopher  P.  Cranch,  and 


142   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Ellery  Charming.  There  was  a  sunny  side  of  the 
whole  movement,  as  T.  W.  Higginson  and  F.  B. 
Sanborn,  two  of  the  latest  survivors  of  the  ferment, 
loved  to  emphasize  in  their  talk  and  in  their 
books;  and  it  was  shadowed  also  by  tragedy  and 
the  pathos  of  unfulfilled  desires.  But  as  one 
looks  back  at  it,  in  the  perspective  of  three- 
quarters  of  a  century,  it  seems  chiefly  something 
touchingly  fine.  For  all  these  men  and  women 
tried  to  hitch  their  wagon  to  a  star. 


CHAPTER  VII 

ROMANCE,    POETRY,    AND   HISTORY 

MOVING  in  and  out  of  the  Transcendentalist  circles, 
in  that  great  generation  preceding  the  Civil  War, 
were  a  company  of  other  men  —  romancers,  poets, 
essayists,  historians  —  who  shared  in  the  intellec 
tual  liberalism  of  the  age,  but  who  were  more 
purely  artists  in  prose  and  verse  than  they  were 
seekers  after  the  unattainable.  Hawthorne,  for 
example,  sojourned  at  Concord  and  at  Brook  Farm 
with  some  of  the  most  extreme  types  of  transcen 
dental  extravagance.  The  movement  interested 
him  artistically  and  he  utilized  it  in  his  romances, 
but  personally  he  maintained  an  attitude  of  cool 
detachment  from  it.  Longfellow  was  too  much  of 
an  artist  to  lose  his  head  over  philosophical  ab 
stractions;  Whittier,  at  his  best,  had  a  too  genuine 
poetic  instinct  for  the  concrete;  and  Lowell  and 
Holmes  had  the  saving  gift  of  humor.  Culti 
vated  Boston  gentlemen  like  Prescott,  Motley,  and 

143 


144   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Parkman  preferred  to  keep  their  feet  on  the  solid 
earth  and  write  admirable  histories.  So  the 
mellow  years  went  by.  Most  of  the  widely-read 
American  books  were  being  produced  within 
twenty  miles  of  the  Boston  State  House.  The 
slavery  issue  kept  growling,  far  away,  but  it  was 
only  now  and  then,  as  in  the  enforcement  of  the 
Fugitive  Slave  Act  of  1850,  that  it  was  brought 
sharply  home  to  the  North.  The  "golden  forties" 
were  as  truly  golden  for  New  England  as  for  idle 
California.  There  was  wealth,  leisure,  books,  a 
glow  of  harvest-time  in  the  air,  though  the  spirit 
of  the  writers  is  the  spirit  of  youth. 

Nathaniel  Hawthorne,  our  greatest  writer  of 
pure  romance,  was  Puritan  by  inheritance  and 
temperament,  though  not  in  doctrine  or  in  sym 
pathy.  His  literary  affiliations  were  with  the 
English  and  German  Romanticists,  and  he  pos 
sessed,  for  professional  use,  the  ideas  and  vocabu 
lary  of  his  transcendental  friends.  Born  in  Salem 
in  1804,  he  was  descended  from  Judge  Haw 
thorne  of  Salem  Witchcraft  fame,  and  from  a  long 
line  of  sea-faring  ancestors.  He  inherited  a  mor 
bid  solitariness,  redeemed  in  some  measure  by  a 
physical  endowment  of  rare  strength  and  beauty. 
He  read  Spenser,  Rousseau,  and  the  Newgate  Cal- 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    145 

endar,  was  graduated  at  Bowdoin,  with  Long 
fellow,  in  the  class  of  1825,  and  returned  to  Salem 
for  thirteen  brooding  lonely  years  in  which  he 
tried  to  teach  himself  the  art  of  story -writing.  His 
earliest  tales,  like  Irving's,  are  essays  in  which 
characters  emerge;  he  is  absorbed  in  finding  a 
setting  for  a  preconceived  "moral";  he  is  in  love 
with  allegory  and  parable.  His  own  words  about 
his  first  collection  of  stories,  Twice-Told  Tales, 
have  often  been  quoted:  "They  have  the  pale  tint 
of  flowers  that  blossomed  in  too  retired  a  shade." 
Yet  they  are  for  the  most  part  exquisitely  written. 
After  a  couple  of  years  in  the  Boston  Custom- 
House,  and  a  residence  at  the  socialistic  com 
munity  of  Brook  Farm,  Hawthorne  made  the 
happiest  of  marriages  to  Sophia  Peabody,  and  for 
nearly  four  years  dwelt  in  the  Old  Manse  at  Con 
cord.  He  described  it  in  one  of  the  ripest  of  his 
essays,  the  Preface  to  Mosses  from  an  Old  Manse, 
his  second  collection  of  stories.  After  three  years 
in  the  Custom-House  at  Salem,  his  dismissal  in 
1849  gave  him  leisure  to  produce  his  masterpiece, 
The  Scarlet  Letter,  published  in  1850.  He  was  now 
forty -six.  In  1851,  he  published  The  House  of 
the  Seven  Gables,  The  Wonder-Book,  and  The 
Snow-Image,  and  Other  Tales.  In  1852  came  The 


146   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Blithedale  Romance,  a  rich  ironical  story  drawn 
from  his  Brook  Farm  experience.  Four  years  in 
the  American  Consulate  at  Liverpool  and  three 
subsequent  years  of  residence  upon  the  Continent 
saw  no  literary  harvest  except  carefully  filled 
notebooks  and  the  deeply  imaginative  moral 
romance,  The  Marble  Faun.  Hawthorne  returned 
home  in  1860  and  settled  in  the  Wayside  at  Con 
cord,  busying  himself  with  a  new,  and,  as  was 
destined,  a  never  completed  story  about  the 
elixir  of  immortality.  But  his  vitality  was  ebbing, 
and  in  May,  1864,  he  passed  away  in  his  sleep.  He 
rests  under  the  pines  in  Sleepy  Hollow,  near  the 
Alcotts  and  the  Emersons. 

It  is  difficult  for  contemporary  Americans  to 
assess  the  value  of  such  a  man,  who  evidently  did 
nothing  except  to  write  a  few  books.  His  rare, 
delicate  genius  was  scarcely  touched  by  passing 
events.  Not  many  of  his  countrymen  really  love 
his  writings,  as  they  love,  for  instance  the  writings 
of  Dickens  or  Thackeray  or  Stevenson.  Everyone 
reads,  at  some  time  of  his  life,  The  Scarlet  Letter, 
and  trembles  at  its  passionate  indictment  of  the 
sin  of  concealment,  at  its  agonized  admonition, 
"Be  true!  Be  true!"  'Perhaps  the  happiest 
memories  of  Hawthorne's  readers,  as  of  Kipling's 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    147 

readers,  hover  about  his  charming  stories  for  chil 
dren;  to  have  missed  The  Wonder-Book  is  like  hav 
ing  grown  old  without  ever  catching  the  sweetness 
of  the  green  world  at  dawn.  But  our  public  has 
learned  to  enjoy  a  wholly  different  kind  of  style, 
taught  by  the  daily  journals,  a  nervous,  graphic, 
sensational,  physical  style,  fit  for  describing  an 
automobile,  a  department  store,  a  steamship,  a 
lynching  party.  It  is  the  style  of  our  day,  and 
judged  by  it  Hawthorne,  who  wrote  with  severity, 
conscience,  and  good  taste,  seems  somewhat  old- 
fashioned,  like  Irving  or  Addison.  He  is  perhaps 
too  completely  a  New  Englander  to  be  understood 
by  men  of  other  stock,  and  has  never,  like  Poe 
and  Whitman,  excited  strong  interest  among 
European  minds. 

Yet  no  American  is  surer,  generation  after  gen 
eration,  of  finding  a  fit  audience.  Hawthorne's 
genius  was  meditative  rather  than  dramatic. 
His  artistic  material  was  moral  rather  than  physi 
cal  ;  he  brooded  over  the  soul  of  man  as  affected  by 
this  and  that  condition  and  situation.  The  child 
of  a  new  analytical  age,  he  thought  out  with  rigid 
accuracy  the  precise  circumstances  surrounding 
each  one  of  his  cases  and  modifying  it.  Many  of 
his  sketches  and  short  stortes  and  most  of  his 


148   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

romances  deal  with  historical  facts,  moods,  and 
atmospheres,  and  he  knew  the  past  of  New  Eng 
land  as  few  men  have  ever  known  it.  There  is 
solid  historical  and  psychological  stuff  as  the 
foundation  of  his  air-castles.  His  latent  radical 
ism  furnished  him  with  a  touchstone  of  criticism 
as  he  interpreted  the  moral  standards  of  ancient 
communities;  no  reader  of  The  Scarlet  Letter  can 
forget  Hawthorne's  implicit  condemnation  of  the 
unimaginative  harshness  of  the  Puritans.  His  own 
judgment  upon  the  deep  matters  of  the  human 
conscience  was  stern  enough,  but  it  was  a  univer 
salized  judgment,  and  by  no  means  the  result  of  a 
Calvinism  which  he  hated.  Over-fond  as  he  was 
in  his  earlier  tales  of  elaborate,  fanciful,  decorative 
treatment  of  themes  that  promised  to  point  a 
moral,  in  his  finest  short  stories,  such  as  The  Am 
bitious  Guest,  The  Gentle  Boy,  Young  Goodman 
Brown,  The  Snow  Image,  The  Great  Stone  Face, 
Drowne's  Wooden  Image,  Rappacinis  Daughter, 
the  moral,  if  there  be  one,  is  not  obtruded.  He 
loves  physical  symbols  for  mental  and  moral  states, 
and  was  poet  and  Transcendentalist  enough  to 
retain  his  youthful  affection  for  parables;  but  his 
true  field  as  a  story-teller  is  the  erring,  questing, 
aspiring,  shadowed  human  heart. 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    149 

The  Scarlet  Letter,  for  instance,  is  a  study  of  a 
universal  theme,  the  problem  of  concealed  sin, 
punishment,  redemption.  Only  the  setting  is 
provincial.  The  story  cannot  be  rightly  estimated, 
it  is  true,  without  remembering  the  Puritan  rever 
ence  for  physical  purity,  the  Puritan  reverence  for 
the  magistrate-minister  —  differing  so  widely  from 
the  respect  of  Latin  countries  for  the  priest  —  the 
Puritan  preoccupation  with  the  life  of  the  soul,  or, 
as  more  narrowly  construed  by  Calvinism,  the 
problem  of  evil.  The  word  Adultery,  although 
suggestively  enough  present  in  one  of  the  finest 
symbolical  titles  ever  devised  by  a  romancer,  does 
not  once  occur  in  the  book.  The  sins  dealt  with 
are  hypocrisy  and  revenge.  Arthur  Dimmesdale, 
Hester  Prynne,  and  Roger  Chillingworth  are 
developing,  suffering,  living  creatures,  caught 
inextricably  in  the  toils  of  a  moral  situation.  By 
an  incomparable  succession  of  pictures  Hawthorne 
exhibits  the  travail  of  their  souls.  In  the  greatest 
•  scene  of  all,  that  between  Hester  and  Arthur  in 
the  forest,  the  Puritan  framework  of  the  story 
gives  way  beneath  the  weight  of  human  passion, 
and  we  seem  on  the  verge  of  another  and  perhaps 
larger  solution  than  was  actually  worked  out  by 
the  logic  of  succeeding  events.  But  though  the 


150   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

book  has  been  called  Christless,  prayerless,  hope 
less,  no  mature  person  ever  reads  it  without  a 
deepened  sense  of  the  impotence  of  all  mechanistic 
theories  of  sin,  and  a  new  vision  of  the  intense 
reality  of  spiritual  things.  "The  law  we  broke," 
in  Dimmesdale's  ghostly  words,  was  a  more  subtle 
law  than  can  be  graven  on  tables  of  stone  and 
numbered  as  the  Seventh  Commandment. 

The  legacy  of  guilt  is  likewise  the  theme  of  The 
House  of  the  Seven  Gables,  which  Hawthorne  him 
self  was  inclined  to  think  a  better  book  than  The 
Scarlet  Letter.  Certainly  this  story  of  old  Salem 
is  impeccably  written  and  its  subtle  handling  of 
tone  and  atmosphere  is  beyond  dispute.  An  ances 
tral  curse,  the  visitation  of  the  sins  of  the  fathers 
upon  the  children,  the  gradual  decay  of  a  once 
sound  stock,  are  motives  that  Ibsen  might  have 
developed.  But  the  Norseman  would  have  failed 
to  rival  Hawthorne's  delicate  manipulation  of  his 
shadows,  and  the  no  less  masterly  deftness  of  the 
ultimate  mediation  of  a  dark  inheritance  through 
the  love  of  the  light-hearted  Phoebe  for  the  latest 
descendant  of  the  Maules.  In  The  Blithedale 
Romance  Hawthorne  stood  for  once,  perhaps,  too 
near  his  material  to  allow  the  rich  atmospheric 
effects  which  he  prefers,  and  in  spite  of  the  unfor- 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    151 

getable  portrait  of  Zenobia  and  powerful  passages 
of  realistic  description,  the  book  is  not  quite 
focussed.  In  The  Marble  Faun  Hawthorne  comes 
into  his  own  again.  Its  central  problem  is  one 
of  those  dark  insoluble  ones  that  he  loves:  the 
influence  of  a  crime  upon  the  development  of  a 
soul.  Donatello,  the  Faun,  is  a  charming  young 
creature  of  the  natural  sunshine  until  his  love  for 
the  somber  Miriam  tempts  him  to  the  commission 
of  murder :  then  begins  the  growth  of  his  mind  and 
character.  Perhaps  the  haunting  power  of  the 
main  theme  of  the  book  has  contributed  less  to  its 
fame  than  the  felicity  of  its  descriptions  of  Rome 
and  Italy.  For  Hawthorne  possessed,  like  Byron, 
in  spite  of  his  defective  training  in  the  appreci 
ation  of  the  arts,  a  gift  of  romantic  discernment 
which  makes  The  Marble  Faun,  like  Childe  Harold, 
a  glorified  guide-book  to  the  Eternal  City. 

All  of  Hawthorne's  books,  in  short,  have  a 
central  core  of  psychological  romance,  and  a  rich 
surface  finish  of  description.  His  style,  at  its 
best,  has  a  subdued  splendor  of  coloring  which  is 
only  less  wonderful  than  the  spiritual  perceptions 
with  which  this  magician  was  endowed.  The  gloom 
which  haunts  many  of  his  pages,  as  I  have  said 
elsewhere,  is  the  long  shadow  cast  by  our  mortal 


152   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

destiny  upon  a  sensitive  soul.  The  mystery  is  our 
mystery,  perceived,  and  not  created,  by  that  finely 
endowed  mind  and  heart.  The  shadow  is  our 
shadow;  the  gleams  of  insight,  the  soft  radiance  of 
truth  and  beauty,  are  his  own. 
^A  college  classmate  of  Henry  Wadsworth 

j  Longfellow  summed  up  the  Portland  boy's  char 
acter  in  one  sentence:  "It  appeared  easy  for  him 
to  avoid  the  unworthy."  Born  in  1807,  of  May 
flower  stock  that  had  distinguished  itself  for 

^-bravery  and  uprightness,  the  youth  was  graduated 


Bowdoin  at  eighteen.  Like  his  classmate 
Hawthorne,  he  had  been  a  wide  and  secretly 
ambitious  reader,  and  had  followed  the  successive 
numbers  of  Irving's  Sketch  Book,  he  tells  us, 
"with  ever  increasing  wonder  and  delight."  His 
college  offered  him  in  1826  a  professorship  of  the 
modern  languages,  and  he  spent  three  happy 
years  in  Europe  in  preparation.  He  taught 
successfully  at  Bowdoin  for  five  or  six  years,  and 
for  eighteen  years,  1836  to  1854,  served  as  George 
Ticjknor's  successor  at  Harvard,  ultimately  sur 
rendering  the  chair  to  Lowell.  He  early  pub 
lished  two  prose  volumes,  Hyperion  and  Outre-mer, 
Irvingesque  romances  of  European  travel.  Then 
cume,  after  ten  years  of  teaching  and  the  death 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    153 

of  his  young  wife,  the  sudden  impulse  to  write 
poetry,  and  he  produced,  "softly  excited,  I  know 
not  why, "  The  Reaper  and  the  Flowers,  a  Psalm  of 
Death.  From  that  December  morning  in  1838 
until  his  death  in  1882  he  was  Longfellow  the 
Poet. 

His  outward  life,  like  Hawthorne's,  was  barren 
of  dramatic  incident,  save  the  one  tragic  accident 
by  which  his  second  wife,  the  mother  of  his  chil 
dren,  perished  before  his  eyes  in  1861.  He  bore  the 
calamity  with  the  quiet  courage  of  his  race  and 
breeding.  But  otherwise  his  days  ran  softly 
and  gently,  enriched  with  books  and  friendships, 
sheltered  from  the  storms  of  circumstance.  He 
had  leisure  to  grow  ripe,  to  remember,  and  to 
dream.  But  he  never  secluded  himself,  like 
Tennyson,  from  normal  contacts  with  his  fellow- 
men.  The  owner  of  the  Craigie  House  was  a 
good  neighbor,  approachable  and  deferential.  He 
was  even  interested  in  local  Cambridge  politics. 
On  the  larger  political  issues  of  his  day  his  Ameri 
canism  was  sound  and  loyal.  "It  is  dishearten 
ing,"  he  wrote  in  his  Cambridge  journal  for  1851, 
"to  see  how  little  sympathy  there  is  in  the  hearts 
of  the  young  men  here  for  freedom  and  great 
ideas."  But  his  own  sympathy  never  wavered. 


154   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

His  linguistic  talent  helped  him  to  penetrate 
the  secrets  of  alien  ways  of  thought  and  speech. 
He  understood  Italy  and  Spain,  Holland  and 
France  and  Germany.  He  had  studied  them  on 
the  lips  of  their  living  men  and  women  and  in 
the  books  where  soldier  and  historian,  priest  and 
poet,  had  inscribed  the  record  of  five  hundred 
years.  From  the  Revival  of  Learning  to  the  mid 
dle  of  the  nineteenth  century,  Longfellow  knew 
the  soul  of  Europe  as  few  men  have  known  it,  and 
he  helped  to  translate  Europe  to  America.  His 
intellectual  receptivity,  his  quick  eye  for  color 
and  costume  and  landscape,  his  ear  for  folk-lore 
and  ballad,  his  own  ripe  mastery  of  words,  made 
him  the  most  resourceful  of  international  inter 
preters.  And  this  lover  of  children,  walking  in 
quiet  ways,  this  refined  and  courteous  host  and 
gentleman,  scholar  and  poet,  exemplified  without 
self-advertisement  the  richer  qualities  of  his  own 
people.  When  Couper's  statue  of  Longfellow 
was  dedicated  in  Washington,  Hamilton  Mabie 
said:  "His  freedom  from  the  sophistication  of  a 
more  experienced  country;  his  simplicity,  due  in 
large  measure  to  the  absence  of  social  self-con 
sciousness;  his  tranquil  and  deep-seated  optimism, 
which  is  the  effluence  of  an  unexhausted  soil;  his 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    155 

happy  and  confident  expectation,  born  of  a  sense 
of  tremendous  national  vitality;  his  love  of  simple 
things  in  normal  relations  to  world-wide  interests 
of  the  mind;  his  courage  in  interpreting  those 
deeper  experiences  which  craftsmen  who  know  art 
but  who  do  not  know  life  call  commonplaces; 
the  unaffected  and  beautiful  democracy  of  his 
spirit — these  are  the  delicate  flowers  of  our  new 
world,  and  as  much  a  part  of  it  as  its  stretches  of 
wilderness  and  the  continental  roll  of  its  rivers." 
Longfellow's  poetic  service  to  his  countrymen 
has  thus  become  a  national  asset,  and  not  merely 
because  hi  his  three  best  known  narrative  poems, 
Evangeline,  Hiawatha,  and  The  Courtship  of  Miles 
Standish,  he  selected  his  themes  from  our  own 
history.  The  Building  of  the  Ship,  written  with  full 
faith  in  the  troubled  year  of  1849,  is  a  national 
anthem.  "It  is  a  wonderful  gift,"  said  Lincoln, 
as  he  listened  to  it,  his  eyes  filled  with  tears,  "to 
be  able  to  stir  men  like  that."  The  Skeleton  in 
Armor,  A  Ballad  of  the  French  Fleet,  Paul  Revere *s 
Ride,  The  Wreck  of  the  Hesperus,  are  ballads  that 
stir  men  still.  For  all  of  his  skill  in  story-telling 
in  verse — witness  the  Tales  of  a  Wayside  Inn — 
Longfellow  was  not  by  nature  a  dramatist,  and  his 
trilogy  now  published  under  the  title  of  Christus, 


156   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

made  up  of  The  Divine  Tragedy,  The  Golden  Legend, 
and  New  England  Tragedies,  added  little  to  a  repu 
tation  won  in  other  fields.  His  sonnets,  parti 
cularly  those  upon  Chaucer,  Milton,  The  Divina 
Commedia,  A  Nameless  Grave,  Felton,  Sumner, 
Nature,  My  Books,  are  among  the  imperishable 
treasures  of  the  English  language.  In  descriptive 
pieces  like  Keramos  and  The  Hanging  of  the  Crane, 
in  such  personal  and  occasional  verses  as  The 
Herons  of  Elmwood,  The  Fiftieth  Birthday  of  Agassiz, 
and  the  noble  Morituri  Salutamus  written  for  his 
classmates  in  1875,  he  exhibits  his  tenderness  of 
affection  and  all  the  ripeness  of  his  technical  skill. 
But  it  was  as  a  lyric  poet,  after  all,  that  he  won  and 
held  his  immense  audience  throughout  the  English- 
speaking  world.  Two  of  the  most  popular  of  all 
his  early  pieces,  The  Psalm  of  Life  and  Excelsior, 
have  paid  the  price  of  a  too  apt  adjustment  to  the 
ethical  mood  of  an  earnest  moment  in  our  national 
life.  We  have  passed  beyond  them.  And  many 
readers  may  have  outgrown  their  youthful  pleasure 
in  Maidenhood,  The  Rainy  Day,  The  Bridge,  The 
Day  is  Done,  verses  whose  simplicity  lent  them 
selves,  temptingly  to  parody.-  Yet  such  poems  as 
The  Belfry  of  Bruges,  Seaweed,  The  Fire  of  Drift 
wood,  The  Arsenal  at  Springfield,  My  Lost  Youth, 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    157 

The  Children  s  Hour,  and  many  another  lyric,  lose 
nothing  with  the  lapse  of  time.  There  is  fortu 
nately  infinite  room  for  personal  preference  in  this 
whole  matter  of  poetry,  but  the  confession  of  a  lack 
of  regard  for  Longfellow's  verse  must  often  be 
recognized  as  a  confession  of  a  lessening  love  for 
what  is  simple,  graceful,  and  refined.  The  cur 
rent  of  contemporary  American  taste,  especially 
among  consciously  clever,  half-trained  persons, 
seems  to  be  running  against  Longfellow.  How 
soon  the  tide  may  turn,  no  one  can  say.  Mean 
while  he  has  his  tranquil  place  in  the  Poet's  Corner 
of  Westminster  Abbey.  The  Abbey  must  be  a 
pleasant  spot  to  wait  in,  for  the  Portland  boy. 
-ftldly  enough,  some  of  the  over-sophisticated 
and  under-experienced  people  who  affect  to  pat 
ronize  Longfellow  assume  toward  John  Greenleaf 
Whittier  an  air  of  deference.  This  attitude 
would  amuse  the  Quaker  poet.  One  can  almost 
see  his  dark  eyes  twinkle  and  the  grim  lips 
tighten  in  that  silent  laughter  in  which  the  old 
man  so  much  resembled  Cooper's  Leather-Stock 
ing.  Whittier  knew  that  his  friend  Longfellow 
was  a  better  artist  than  himself,  and  he  also  knew, 
by  intimate  experience  as  a  maker  of  public  opin 
ion,  how  variable  are  its  judgments. 


158   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Whittier  represents  a  stock  different  from  that 
of  the  Longfellows,  but  equally  American,  equally 
thoroughbred:  the  Essex  County  Quaker  farmer 
of  Massachusetts.  The  homestead  in  which  he  was 
born  in  1807,  at  East  Haverhill,  had  been  built 
by  his  great-great-grandfather  in  1688.  Mount 
Vernon  in  Virginia  and  the  Craigie  House  in 
Cambridge  are  newer  than  this  by  two  generations. 
The  house  has  been  restored  to  the  precise  aspect 
it  had  in  Whittier's  boyhood:  and  the  garden, 
lawn,  and  brook,  even  the  door-stone  and  bridle- 
post  and  the  barn  across  the  road  are  witnesses 
to  the  fidelity  of  the  descriptions  in  Snow-Bound. 
The  neighborhood  is  still  a  lonely  one.  The 
youth  grew  up  in  seclusion,  yet  in  contact  with  a 
few  great  ideas,  chief  among  them  Liberty.  "  My 
father,"  he  said,  "was  an  old-fashioned  Demo 
crat,  and  really  believed  in  the  Preamble  of  the 
Bill  of  Rights  which  reaffirmed  the  Declaration 
of  Independence."  The  taciturn  father  trans 
mitted  to  his  sons  a  hatred  of  kingcraft  and  priest 
craft,  the  inward  moral  freedom  of  the  Quaker 
touched  with  humanitarian  passion.  The  spirit  of 
a  boyhood  in  this  homestead  is  veraciously  told 
in  The  Barefoot  Boy,  School-Days,  Snow-Bound, 
Ramoth  Hill,  and  Telling  the  Bees.  It  was  a  chance 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    159 

copy  of  Burns  that  revealed  to  the  farmer  lad  his 
own  desire  and  capacity  for  verse-writing.  When 
he  was  nineteen,  his  sister  sent  his  Exile's  Depar 
ture  to  William  Lloyd  Garrison,  then  twenty,  and 
the  editor  of  the  Newburyport  Free  Press.  The 
neighbors  liked  it,  and  the  tall  frail  author  was 
rewarded  with  a  term  at  the  Haverhill  Academy, 
where  he  paid  his  way,  in  old  Essex  County 
fashion,  by  making  shoes. 

He  had  little  more  formal  schooling  than  this, 
was  too  poor  to  enter  college,  but  had  what  he 
modestly  called  a  "knack  at  rhyming,"  and 
much  facility  in  prose.  He  turned  to  journalism 
and  politics,  for  which  he  possessed  a  notable 
instinct.  For  a  while  he  thought  he  had  "done 
with  poetry  and  literature."  Then  in  1833,  at 
twenty-six,  came  Garrison's  stirring  letter  bidding 
him  enlist  in  the  cause  of  Anti-Slavery.  He  obeyed 
the  call,  not  knowing  that  this  new  allegiance 
to  the  service  of  humanity  was  to  transform  him 
from  a  facile  local  verse-writer  into  a  national 
poet.  It  was  the  ancient  miracle  of  losing  one's 
life  and  finding  it.  For  the  immediate  sacrifice 
was  very  real  to  a  youth  trained  in  quietism  and 
non-resistance,  and  well  aware,  as  a  Whig  journal 
ist,  of  the  ostracism  visited  upon  the  active 


160   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Abolitionists.  Whittier  entered  the  fight  with 
absolute  courage  and  with  the  shrewdest  practical 
judgment  of  weapons  and  tactics.  He  forgot 
himself.  He  turned  aside  from  those  pleasant 
fields  of  New  England  legend  and  history  to  which 
he  was  destined  to  return  after  his  warfare  was 
accomplished.  He  had  read  the  prose  of  Milton 
and  of  Burke.  He  perceived  that  negro  emanci 
pation  in  the  United  States  was  only  a  single 
and  immediate  phase  of  a  universal  movement  of 
liberalism.  The  thought  kindled  his  imagination. 
He  wrote,  at  white  heat,  political  and  social  verse 
that  glowed  with  humanitarian  passion:  lyrics  in 
praise  of  fellow- workers,  salutes  to  the  dead, 
campaign  songs,  hymns,  satires  against  the  clergy 
and  the  capitalists,  superb  sectional  poems  like 
Massachusetts  to  Virginia,  and,  more  nobly  still, 
poems  embodying  what  Wordsworth  called  "the 
sensation  and  image  of  country  and  the  human 


race. " 


Whittier  had  now  "found  himself"  as  a  poet. 
It  is  true  that  his  style  remained  diffuse  and 
his  ear  faulty,  but  his  countrymen,  then  as  now 
uncritical  of  artistic  form,  overlooked  the  blem 
ishes  of  his  verse,  and  thought  only  of  his  vib 
rant  emotion,  his  scorn  of  cowardice  and  evil,  his 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    161 

prophetic  exaltation.  In  1847  came  the  first 
general  collection  of  his  poems,  and  here  were  to  be 
found  not  merely  controversial  verses,  but  spirited 
Songs  of  Labor,  pictures  of  the  lovely  Merrimac 
countryside,  legends  written  in  the  mood  of  Haw 
thorne  or  Longfellow,  and  bright  bits  of  foreign 
lore  and  fancy.  For  though  Whittier  never 
went  abroad,  his  quiet  life  at  Amesbury  gave 
him  leisure  for  varied  reading,  and  he  followed 
contemporary  European  politics  with  the  closest 
interest.  He  emerged  more  and  more  from  the 
atmosphere  of  faction  and  section,  and,  though  he 
retained  to  the  last  his  Quaker  creed',  he  held  its 
simple  tenets  in  such  undogmatic  and  winning 
fashion  that  his  hymns  are  sung  today  in  all  the 
churches. 

When  The  Atlantic  Monthly  was  established  in 
1857,  Whittier  was  fifty.  He  took  his  place  among 
the  contributors  to  the  new  magazine  not  as  a 
controversialist  but  as  a  man  of  letters,  with  such 
poems  as  Tritemius,  and  Skipper  Ireson's  Ride. 
Characteristic  productions  of  this  period  are 
My  Psalm,  Cobbler  Keezar's  Vision,  Andrew 
Rykman's  Prayer,  The  Eternal  Goodness  —  poems 
grave,  sweet,  and  tender.  But  it  was  not  until  the 
publication  of  Snow-Bound  in  1866  that  Whittier 's 


162  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

work  touched  its  widest  popularity.  He  had 
never  married,  and  the  deaths  of  his  mother 
and  sister  Elizabeth  set  him  brooding,  in  the  deso 
late  Amesbury  house,  over  memories  of  his  birth 
place,  six  miles  away  in  East  Haverhill.  The 
homestead  had  gone  out  of  the  hands  of  the 
Whittiers,  and  the  poet,  nearing  sixty,  set  himself 
to  compose  an  idyll  descriptive  of  the  vanished 
past.  No  artist  could  have  a  theme  more  per 
fectly  adapted  to  his  mood  and  to  his  powers. 
There  are  no  novel  ideas  in  Snow-Bound,  nor  is 
there  any  need  of  them,  but  the  thousands  of 
annual  pilgrims  to  the  old  farmhouse  can  bear 
witness  to  the  touching  intimacy,  the  homely 
charm,  the  unerring  Tightness  of  feeling  with 
which  Whittier's  genius  recreated  his  own  lost 
youth  and  painted  for  all  time  a  true  New  England 
hearthside. 

Whittier  was  still  to  write  nearly  two  hundred 
mere  poems,  for  he  lived  to  be  eighty-five,  and  he 
coiiposed  until  the  last.  But  his  creative  period 
was  now  over.  He  rejoiced  in  the  friendly  recogni 
tion  of  his  work  that  came  to  him  from  every  sec 
tion  of  a  reunited  country.  His  personal  friends 
were  loyal  in  their  devotion.  He  followed  the 
intricacies  of  American  politics  with  the  keen 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    163 

zest  of  a  veteran  in  that  game,  for  in  his  time 
he  had  made  and  unmade  governors  and  senators. 
"The  greatest  politician  I  have  ever  met,"  said 
James  G.  Blaine,  who  had  certainly  met  many. 
He  had  an  income  from  his  poems  far  in  excess 
of  his  needs,  but  retained  the  absolute  simplicity 
of  his  earlier  habits.  When  his  publishers  first 
proposed  the  notable  public  dinner  in  honor  of 
his  seventieth  birthday  he  demurred,  explaining 
to  a  member  of  his  family  that  he  did  not  want  the 
bother  of  "buying  a  new  pair  of  pants" — a  petty 
anecdote,  but  somehow  refreshing.  So  the  rustic, 
shrewd,  gentle  old  man  waited  for  the  end.  He 
had  known  what  it  means  to  toil,  to  fight,  to 
renounce,  to  eat  his  bread  in  tears,  and  to  see 
some  of  his  dreams  come  true.  We  have  had, 
and  shall  have,  more  accomplished  craftsmen  in 
verse,  but  we  have  never  bred  a  more  genuine 
man  than  Whittier,  nor  one  who  had  more  kinship 
with  the  saints. 

A  few  days  before  Whittier's  death,  he  wrote 
an  affectionate  poem  in  celebration  of  the  eighty- 
third  birthday  of  his  old  friend  of  the  Saturday 
Club,  Dr.  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes.  This  was  in 
1892.  The  little  Doctor,  rather  lonely  in  his  latest 
years,  composed  some  tender  obituary  verses 


164   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

at  Whittier's  passing.  He  had  already  performed 
the  same  office  for  Lowell.  He  lingered  himself 
until  the  autumn  of  1894,  in  his  eighty-sixth  year— 
The  Last  Leaf,  in  truth,  of  New  England's  richest 
springtime. 

"No,  my  friends,"  he  had  said  in  The  Autocrat 
of  the  Breakfast  Table,  "I  go  (always,  other  things 
being  equal)  for  the  man  who  inherits  family 
traditions  and  the  cumulative  humanities  of  at 
least  four  or  five  generations. "  The  Doctor  came 
naturally  by  his  preference  for  a  "man  of  family," 
being  one  himself.  He  was  a  descendant  of  Anne 
Bradstreet,  the  poetess.  "Dorothy  Q.,"  whom  he 
had  made  the  most  picturesque  of  the  Quincys, 
was  his  great-grandmother.  Wendell  Phillips 
was  his  cousin.  His  father,  the  Rev.  Abiel  Holmes, 
a  Yale  graduate,  was  the  minister  of  the  First 
Church  in  Cambridge,  and  it  was  in  its  "gambrel- 
roofed"  parsonage  that  Oliver  Wendell  was  born 
in  1809. 

Know  old  Cambridge?    Hope  you  do. — 
Born  there?     Don't  say  so!     I  was,  too. 

Nicest  place  that  was  ever  seen — 
Colleges  red  and  Common  green. 

So  he  wrote,  in  scores  of  passages  of  filial  devotion, 
concerning   the  village   of   his  boyhood   and  the 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    165 

city  of  Boston.  His  best-known  prose  sentence 
is:  "Boston  State  House  is  the  hub  of  the  Solar 
System."  It  is  easy  to  smile,  as  indeed  he  did 
himself,  at  such  fond  provinciality,  but  the  fact 
remains  that  our  literature  as  a  whole  sadly  needs 
this  richness  of  local  atmosphere.  A  nation  of 
restless  immigrants,  here  today  and  "moved  on" 
tomorrow,  has  the  fibres  of  its  imagination 
uprooted,  and  its  artists  in  their  eager  quest  of 
"local  color"  purchase  brilliancy  at  the  cost  of 
thinness  of  tone,  poverty  of  association.  Phila 
delphia  and  Boston,  almost  alone  among  the 
larger  American  cities,  yield  the  sense  of  intimacy, 
or  what  the  Autocrat  would  call  "the  cumulative 
humanities. " 

Young  Holmes  became  the  pet  and  the  glory  of 
his  class  of  1829  at  Harvard.  It  was  only  in  1838 
that  their  reunions  began,  but  thereafter  they 
held  fifty-six  meetings,  of  which  Holmes  attended 
fifty  and  wrote  poems  for  forty-three.  Many  of 
"the  Boys"  whom  he  celebrated  became  famous 
in  their  own  right,  but  they  remain  "the  Boys"  to 
all  lovers  of  Holmes's  verses.  His  own  career  as  a 
poet  had  begun  during  his  single  year  in  the  Law 
School.  His  later  years  brought  him  some  addi 
tional  skill  in  polishing  his  lines  and  a  riper  human 


166   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

wisdom,  but  his  native  verse-making  talent  is  as 
completely  revealed  in  Old  Ironsides,  published 
when  he  was  twenty-one,  and  in  The  Last  Leaf, 
composed  a  year  or  two  later,  as  in  anything 
he  was  to  write  during  the  next  half -century.  In 
many  respects  he  was  a  curious  survival  of  the 
cumulative  humanities  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
He  might  have  been,  like  good  Dr.  Arbuthnot,  an 
ornament  of  the  Augustan  age.  He  shared  with 
the  English  Augustans  a  liking  for  the  rhymed 
couplet,  an  instinctive  social  sense,  a  feeling  for 
the  presence  of  an  imaginary  audience  of  congenial 
listeners.  One  still  catches  the  "Hear!  Hear!" 
between  his  clever  lines.  In  many  of  the  traits 
of  his  mind  this  "Yankee  Frenchman"  resembled 
such  a  typical  eighteenth  century  figure  as  Vol 
taire.  Like  Voltaire,  he  was  tolerant — except 
toward  Calvinism  and  Homeopathy.  In  some  of 
the  tricks  of  his  prose  style  he  is  like  a  kindlier 
Sterne.  His  knack  for  vers  de  societe  was  caught 
from  Horace,  but  he  would  not  have  been  a 
child  of  his  own  age  without  the  additional  gift 
of  rhetoric  and  eloquence  which  is  to  be  seen  in  his 
patriotic  poems  and  his  hymns.  For  Holmes  pos 
sessed,  in  spite  of  all  his  limitations  in  poetic  range, 
true  devotion,  patriotism,  humor,  and  pathos. 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    167 

His  poetry  was  in  the  best  sense  of  the  word 
"occasional,"  and  his  prose  was  only  an  incidental 
or  accidental  harvest  of  a  long  career  in  which  his 
chief  duty  was  that  of  a  professor  of  anatomy  in 
the  Harvard  Medical  School.  He  had  studied 
in  Paris  under  sound  teachers,  and  after  some 
years  of  private  practice  won  the  appointment 
which  he  held,  as  active  and  emeritus  professor,  for 
forty-seven  years.  He  was  a  faithful,  clear,  and 
amusing  lecturer,  and  printed  two  or  three  nota 
ble  medical  essays,  but  his  chief  Boston  reputa 
tion,  in  the  eighteen-fifties,  was  that  of  a  wit  and 
diner-out  and  writer  of  verses  for  occasions.  Then 
came  his  great  hour  of  good  luck  in  1857,  when 
Lowell,  the  editor  of  the  newly-established  Atlantic 
Monthly,  persuaded  him  to  write  The  Autocrat  of 
the  Breakfast  Table.  It  was  the  public's  luck 
also,  for  whoever  had  been  so  unfortunate  as  not 
to  be  born  in  Boston  could  now  listen — as  if  across 
the  table — to  Boston's  best  talker.  Few  volumes 
of  essays  during  the  last  sixty  years  have  given 
more  pleasure  to  a  greater  variety  of  readers  than 
is  yielded  by  The  Autocrat.  It  gave  the  Doctor  a 
reputation  in  England  which  he  naturally  prized, 
and  which  contributed  to  his  triumphal  English 
progress,  many  years  later,  recorded  pleasantly  in 


168   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Our  Hundred  Days.  The  Professor  at  the  Breakfast 
Table  and  The  Poet  at  the  Breakfast  Table  are  less 
successful  variations  of  The  Autocrat.  Neither 
professors  nor  poets  are  at  their  best  at  this  meal. 
Holmes  wrote  three  novels — of  which  Elsie  Venner, 
a  somewhat  too  medical  story,  is  the  best  remem 
bered —  memoirs  of  his  friends  Emerson  and 
Motley,  and  many  miscellaneous  essays.  His  life 
was  exceptionally  happy,  and  his  cheery  good 
opinion  of  himself  is  still  contagious.  To  pro 
nounce  the  words  Doctor  Holmes  in  any  company 
of  intelligent  Americans  is  the  prologue  to  a  smile 
of  recognition,  comprehension,  sympathy.  The 
word  Goldsmith  has  now  lost,  alas,  this  provo 
cative  quality;  the  word  Stevenson  still  possesses 
it.  The  little  Doctor,  who  died  in  the  same  year 
as  Stevenson,  belonged  like  him  to  the  genial  race 
of  friends  of  mankind,  and  a  few  of  his  poems, 
and  some  gay  warm-hearted  pages  of  his  prose, 
will  long  preserve  his  memory.  But  the  Boston 
which  he  loved  has  vanished  as  utterly  as  Sam 
Johnson's  London. 

James  Russell  Lowell  was  ten  years  younger 
than  Holmes,  and  though  he  died  three  years  be 
fore  the  Doctor,  he  seems,  for  other  reasons  than 
those  of  chronology,  to  belong  more  nearly  to  the 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    169 

present.  Although  by  birth  as  much  of  a  New 
England  Brahmin  as  Holmes,  and  in  his  later  years 
as  much  of  a  Boston  and  Cambridge  idol,  he  never 
theless  touched  our  universal  American  life  on 
many  sides,  represented  us  worthily  in  foreign 
diplomacy,  argued  the  case  of  Democracy  with 
convincing  power,  and  embodied,  as  more  perfect 
artists  like  Hawthorne  and  Longfellow  could 
never  have  done,  the  subtleties  and  potencies 
of  the  national  temperament.  He  deserves  and 
reveals  the  closest  scrutiny,  but  his  personality  is 
difficult  to  put  on  paper.  Horace  Scudder  wrote 
his  biography  with  careful  competence,  and 
Ferris  Greenslet  has  made  him  the  subject  of  a 
brilliant  critical  study.  Yet  readers  differ  widely 
in  their  assessment  of  the  value  of  his  prose  and 
verse,  and  in  their  understanding  of  his  personality. 
The  external  facts  of  his  career  are  easy  to  trace 
and  must  be  set  down  here  with  brevity.  A 
minister's  son,  and  descended  from  a  very  old 
and  distinguished  family,  he  was  born  at  Elmwood 
in  Cambridge  in  1819.  After  a  somewhat  turbu 
lent  course,  he  was  graduated  from  Harvard  in 
1838,  the  year  of  Emerson's  Divinity  School 
Address.  He  studied  law,  turned  Abolitionist, 
wrote  poetry,  married  the  beautiful  and  transcen- 


170   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

dental  Maria  White,  and  did  magazine  work  in 
Boston,  New  York,  and  Philadelphia.  He  was 
thought  by  his  friends  in  the  eighteen-fifties  to  be 
"  the  most  Shakespearian  "  man  in  America.  When 
he  was  ten  years  out  of  college,  in  1848,  he  pub 
lished  The  Biglow  Papers  (First  Series),  A  Fable 
for  Critics,  and  The  Vision  of  Sir  Launfal.  After  a 
long  visit  to  Europe  and  the  death  of  his  wife,  he 
gave  some  brilliant  Lowell  Institute  lectures  in 
Boston,,  and  was  appointed  Longfellow's  suc 
cessor  at  Harvard.  He  went  to  Europe  again  to 
prepare  himself,  and  after  entering  upon  his  work 
as  a  teacher  made  a  happy  second  marriage,  served 
for  four  years  as  the  first  editor  of  The  Atlantic, 
and  helped  his  friend  Charles  Eliot  Norton  edit 
The  North  American  Review.  The  Civil  War 
inspired  a  second  series  of  Biglow  Papers  and  the 
magnificent  Commemoration  Ode  of  1865.  Then 
came  volume  after  volume  of  literary  essays, 
such  as  Among  My  Books  and  My  Study  Windows, 
and  an  occasional  book  of  verse.  Again  he  made 
a  long  sojourn  in  Europe,  resigned  his  Harvard 
professorship,  and  in  1877  was  appointed  Minister 
to  Spain.  After  three  years  he  was  transferred 
to  the  most  important  post  in  our  diplomatic 
service,  London.  He  performed  his  duties  with 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    171 

extraordinary  skill  and  success  until  1885,  when 
he  was  relieved.  His  last  years  were  spent  in 
Elmwood,  the  Cambridge  house  where  he  was 
born,  and  he  was  still  writing,  in  almost  as  rich 
a  vein  as  ever,  when  the  end  came  in  1891. 

Here  was  certainly  a  full  and  varied  life, 
responsive  to  many  personal  moods  and  many 
tides  of  public  feeling.  Lowell  drew  intellect 
ual  stimulus  from  enormously  wide  reading  in 
classical  and  modern  literatures.  Puritanically 
earnest  by  inheritance,  he  seems  also  to  have 
inherited  a  strain  of  levity  which  he  could  not 
always  control,  and,  through  his  mother's  family, 
a  dash  of  mysticism  sometimes  resembling  second 
sight.  His  physical  and  mental  powers  were  not 
always  in  the  happiest  mutual  adjustment:  he 
became  easily  the  prey  of  moods  and  fancies,  and 
knew  the  alternations  from  wild  gaiety  of  spirits 
to  black  despair.  The  firm  moral  consistency  of 
Puritanism  was  always  his,  yet  his  playful  remark 
about  belonging  in  a  hospital  for  incurable  chil 
dren  had  a  measure  of  truth  in  it  also. 

Both  his  poetry  and  his  prose  reveal  a  nature 
never  quite  integrated  into  wholeness  of  struc 
ture,  into  harmony  with  itself.  His  writing,  at  its 
best,  is  noble  and  delightful,  full  of  human  charm, 


172   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

but  it  is  difficult  for  him  to  master  a  certain 
waywardness  and  to  sustain  any  note  steadily. 
This  temperamental  flaw  does  not  affect  the 
winsomeness  of  his  letters,  unless  to  add  to  it.  It 
is  lost  to  view,  often,  in  the  sincerity  and  pathos  of 
his  lyrics,  but  it  is  felt  in  most  of  his  longer  efforts 
in  prose,  and  accounts  for  a  certain  dissatisfaction 
which  many  grateful  and  loyal  readers  neverthe 
less  feel  in  his  criticism.  Lowell  was  more  richly 
endowed  by  nature  and  by  breadth  of  reading 
than  Matthew  Arnold,  for  instance,  but  in  the 
actual  performance  of  the  critical  function  he  was 
surpassed  in  method  by  Arnold  and  perhaps  in 
inerrant  perception,  in  a  limited  field,  by  Poe. 

It  was  as  a  poet,  however,  that  he  first  won  his 
place  in  our  literature,  and  it  is  by  means  of 
certain  passages  in  the  Biglow  Papers  and  the 
Commemoration  Ode  that  he  has  most  moved 
his  countrymen.  The  effectiveness  of  The  Present 
Crisis  and  Sir  Launfal,  and  of  the  Memorial  Odes, 
particularly  the  Ode  to  Agassiz,  is  likewise  due 
to  the  passion,  sweetness,  and  splendor  of  certain 
strophes,  rather  than  to  the  perfection  of  these 
poems  as  artistic  wholes.  Lowell's  personal  lyrics 
of  sorrow,  such  as  The  Changeling,  The  First  Snow- 
Fall,  After  the  Burial,  have  touched  many  hearts. 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    173 

His  later  lyrics  are  more  subtle,  weighted  with 
thought,  tinged  with  autumnal  melancholy.  He 
was  a  most  fertile  composer,  and,  like  all  the  men 
of  his  time  and  group,  produced  too  much.  Yet 
his  patriotic  verse  was  so  admirable  in  feeling  and 
is  still  so  inspiring  to  his  readers  that  one  cannot 
wish  it  less  in  quantity;  and  in  the  field  of  political 
satire,  such  as  the  two  series  of  Biglow  Papers,  he 
had  a  theme  and  a  method  precisely  suited  to  his 
temperament.  No  American  has  approached 
Lowell's  success  in  this  difficult  genre:  the  swift 
transitions  from  rural  Yankee  humor  to  splendid 
scorn  of  evil  and  to  noblest  idealism  reveal  the  full 
powers  of  one  of  our  most  gifted  men.  The  preacher 
lurked  in  this  Puritan  from  first  to  last,  and  the 
war  against  Mexico  and  the  Civil  War  stirred  him 
to  the  depths. 

His  prose,  likewise,  is  a  school  of  loyalty.  There 
was  much  of  Europe  in  his  learning,  as  his  memor 
able  Dante  essay  shows,  and  the  traditions  of 
great  English  literature  were  the  daily  compan 
ions  of  his  mind.  He  was  bookish,  as  a  bookman 
should  be,  and  sometimes  the  very  richness  and 
whimsicality  of  his  bookish  fancies  marred  the 
simplicity  and  good  taste  of  his  pages.  But  the 
fundamental  texture  of  his  thought  and  feeling 


174   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

was  American,  and  his  most  characteristic  style 
has  the  raciness  of  our  soil.  Nature  lovers  like  to 
point  out  the  freshness  and  delicacy  of  his  reaction 
to  the  New  England  scene.  Thoreau  himself, 
whom  Lowell  did  not  like,  was  not  more  veracious 
an  observer  than  the  author  of  Sunthin  in  the 
Pastoral  Line,  Cambridge  Thirty  Years  Ago, 
and  My  Garden  Acquaintance.  Yet  he  watched 
men  as  keenly  as  he  did  "laylocks"  and  bobolinks, 
and  no  shrewder  American  essay  has  been  written 
than  his  On  a  Certain  Condescension  in  Foreigners. 
Wit  and  humor  and  wisdom  made  him  one  of  the 
best  talkers  of  his  generation.  These  qualities 
pervade  his  essays  and  his  letters,  and  the  latter 
in  particular  reveal  those  ardors  and  fidelities  of 
friendship  which  men  like  Emerson  and  Thoreau 
longed  after  without  ever  quite  experiencing. 
Lowell's  cosmopolitan  reputation,  which  was 
greatly  enhanced  in  the  last  decade  of  his  life, 
seemed  to  his  old  associates  of  the  Saturday 
Club  only  a  fit  recognition  of  the  learning,  wit, 
and  fine  imagination  which  had  been  familiar 
to  them  from  the  first.  To  hold  the  old  friends 
throughout  his  lifetime,  and  to  win  fresh  ones 
of  a  new  generation  through  his  books,  is  perhaps 
the  greatest  of  Lowell's  personal  felicities. 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    175 

While  there  are  no  other  names  in  the  literature 
of  New  England  quite  comparable  with  those  that 
have  just  been  discussed,  it  should  be  remembered 
that  the  immediate  effectiveness  and  popularity  of 
these  representative  poets  and  prose  writers  were 
dependent  upon  the  existence  of  an  intelligent 
and  responsive  reading  public.  The  lectures  of 
Emerson,  the  speeches  of  Webster,  the  stories 
of  Hawthorne,  the  political  verse  of  Whittier 
and  Lowell,  presupposed  a  keen,  reflecting  audi 
ence,  mentally  and  morally  exigent.  The  spread 
of  the  Lyceum  system  along  the  line  of  west 
ward  emigration  from  New  England  as  far  as 
the  Mississippi  is  one  tangible  evidence  of  the 
high  level  of  popular  intelligence.  That  there  was 
much  of  the  superficial  and  the  spread-eagle  in  the 
American  life  of  the  eighteen-forties  is  apparent 
enough  without  the  amusing  comments  of  such 
English  travellers  as  Dickens,  Miss  Martineau, 
and  Captain  Basil  Hall.  But  there  was  also 
genuine  intellectual  curiosity  and  a  general  reading 
habit  which  are  evidenced  not  only  by  a  steady 
growth  of  newspapers  and  magazines  but  also  by 
the  demand  for  substantial  books.  Biography  and 
history  began  to  be  widely  read,  and  it  was  natural 
that  the  most  notable  productiveness  in  historical 


176   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

writing  should  manifest  itself  in  that  section  of  the 
country  where  there  were  libraries,  wealth,  leisure 
for  the  pursuits  of  scholarship,  a  sense  of  intimate 
concern  with  the  great  issues  of  the  past,  and  a 
diffusion  of  intellectual  tastes  throughout  the 
community.  It  was  no  accident  that  Sparks  and 
Ticknor,  Bancroft  and  Prescott,  Motley  and  Park- 
man,  were  Massachusetts  men. 

Jared  Sparks,  it  is  true,  inherited  neither  wealth 
nor  leisure.  He  was  a  furious,  unwearied  toiler 
in  the  field  of  our  national  history.  Born  in  1789, 
by  profession  a  Unitarian  minister,  he  began  col 
lecting  the  papers  of  George  Washington  by  1825. 
John  Marshall,  the  great  jurist,  had  published  his 
five- volume  life  of  his  fellow  Virginian  a  score  of 
years  earlier.  But  Sparks  proceeded  to  write 
another  biography  of  Washington  and  to  edit  his 
writings.  He  also  edited  a  Library  of  American 
Biography,  wrote  lives  of  Franklin  and  Gouver- 
neur  Morris,  was  professor  of  history  and  Presi 
dent  of  Harvard,  and  lived  to  be  seventy-seven. 
As  editor  of  the  writings  of  Franklin  and  Washing 
ton,  he  took  what  we  now  consider  unpardonable 
liberties  in  altering  the  text,  and  this  error  of  judg 
ment  has  somewhat  clouded  his  just  reputation 
as  a  pioneer  in  historical  research. 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    177 

George  Bancroft,  who  was  born  in  1800,  and 
died,  a  horseback-riding  sage,  at  ninety-one,  in 
herited  from  his  clergyman  father  a  taste  for 
history.  He  studied  in  Germany  after  leaving  Har 
vard,  turned  schoolmaster,  Democratic  politician 
and  office-holder,  served  as  Secretary  of  the  Navy, 
Minister  to  England  and  then  to  the  German  Em 
pire,  and  won  distinction  in  each  of  his  avocations, 
though  the  real  passion  of  his  life  was  his  History 
of  the  United  States,  which  he  succeeded  in  bringing 
down  to  the  adoption  of  the  Constitution.  The 
first  volume,  which  appeared  in  1834,  reads  today 
like  a  stump  speech  by  a  sturdy  Democratic  orator 
of  the  Jacksonian  period.  But  there  was  solid 
stuff  in  it,  nevertheless,  and  as  Bancroft  proceeded, 
decade  after  decade,  he  discarded  some  of  his 
rhetoric  and  philosophy  of  democracy  and  utilized 
increasingly  the  vast  stores  of  documents  which  his 
energy  and  his  high  political  positions  had  made 
it  possible  for  him  to  obtain.  Late  in  life  he  con 
densed  his  ten  great  volumes  to  six.  Posterity 
will  doubtless  condense  these  in  turn,  as  posterity 
has  a  way  of  doing,  but  Bancroft  the  historian 
realized  his  own  youthful  ambition  with  a  com 
pleteness  rare  in  the  history  of  human  effort  and 
performed  a  monumental  service  to  his  country. 


178  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

He  was  less  of  an  artist,  however,  than  Prescott, 
the  eldest  and  in  some  ways  the  finest  figure  of 
the  well-known  Prescott-Motley-Parkman  group 
of  Boston  historians.  All  of  these  men,  together 
with  their  friend  George  Ticknor,  who  wrote  the 
History  of  Spanish  Literature  and  whose  own  Life 
and  Letters  pictures  a  whole  generation,  had  the 
professional  advantages  of  inherited  wealth,  and 
the  opportunity  to  make  deliberate  choice  of  a 
historical  field  which  offered  freshness  and  pictur- 
esqueness  of  theme.  All  were  tireless  workers  in 
spite  of  every  physical  handicap;  all  enjoyed  social 
security  and  the  rich  reward  of  full  recognition  by 
their  contemporaries.  They  had  their  world  as 
in  their  time,  as  Chaucer  makes  the  Wife  of  Bath 
say  of  herself,  and  it  was  a  pleasant  world  to  live 
in. 

Grandson  of  "Prescott  the  Brave"  of  Bunker 
Hill,  and  son  of  the  rich  Judge  Prescott  of  Salem, 
William  Hickling  Prescott  was  born  in  1796,  and 
was  graduated  from  Harvard  in  1814.  An  acci 
dent  in  college  destroyed  the  sight  of  one  eye,  and 
left  him  but  a  precarious  use  of  the  other.  Never 
theless  he  resolved  to  emulate  Gibbon,  whose  Auto 
biography  had  impressed  him,  and  to  make  himself 
"an  historian  in  the  best  sense  of  the  term."  He 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    179 

studied  arduously  in  Europe,  with  the  help  of 
secretaries,  and  by  1826,  after  a  long  hesitation, 
decided  upon  a  History  of  the  Reign  of  Ferdinand 
and  Isabella.  In  ten  years  the  three  volumes  were 
finished.  "Pursuing  the  work  in  this  quiet,  lei 
surely  way,  without  over-exertion  or  fatigue," 
wrote  Prescott,  "or  any  sense  of  obligation  to 
complete  it  in  a  given  time,  I  have  found  it  a 
continual  source  of  pleasure."  It  was  published 
at  his  own  expense  on  Christmas  Day,  1837,  and 
met  with  instantaneous  success.  "My  market 
and  my  reputation  rest  principally  with  England," 
he  wrote  in  1838  —  a  curious  footnote,  by  the 
way,  to  Emerson's  Phi  Beta  Kappa  Address  of 
the  year  before.  But  America  joined  with  Eng 
land,  in  praising  the  new  book.  Then  Prescott 
turned  to  the  Conquest  of  Mexico,  the  Conquest  of 
Peru,  and  finally  to  his  unfinished  History  of  the 
Reign  of  Philip  II.  He  had,  as  Dean  Milman 
wrote  him,  "the  judgment  to  choose  noble  sub 
jects.  "  He  wrote  with  serenity  a^d  dignity,  with 
fine  balance  and  proportion.  Some  of  the  Spanish 
documents  upon  which  he  relied  have  been  proved 
less  trustworthy  than  he  thought,  but  this  unsus 
pected  defect  in  his  materials  scarcely  impaired 
the  skill  with  which  this  unhasting,  unresting 


180   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

painter  filled  his  great  canvases.  They  need 
retouching,  perhaps,  but  the  younger  historians 
are  incompetent  for  the  task.  Prescott  died 
in  1859,  in  the  same  year  as  Irving,  and  he 
already  seems  quite  as  remote  from  the  present 
hour. 

His  young  friend  Motley,  of  Dutch  Republic 
fame,  was  another  Boston  Brahmin,  born  in  the 
year  of  Prescott's  graduation  from  college.  He 
attended  George  Bancroft's  school,  went  to  Har 
vard  in  due  course,  where  he  knew  Holmes,  Sum- 
ner,  and  Wendell  Phillips,  and  at  Gottingen  became 
a  warm  friend  of  a  dog-lover  and  duelist  named 
Bismarck.  Young  Motley  wrote  a  couple  of  un 
successful  novels,  dabbled  in  diplomacy,  politics, 
and  review-writing,  and  finally,  encouraged  by 
Prescott,  settled  down  upon  Dutch  history,  went 
to  Europe  to  work  up  his  material  in  1851,  and, 
after  five  years,  scored  an  immense  triumph  with 
his  Rise  of  the  Dutch  Republic.  He  was  a  bril 
liant  partisan,  hating  Spaniards  and  Calvinists, 
and  wrote  all  the  better  for  this  bias.  He  was 
an  admirable  sketcher  of  historical  portraits, 
and  had  Macaulay's  skill  in  composing  special 
chapters  devoted  to  the  tendencies  and  qual 
ities  of  an  epoch  or  to  the  characteristics  of 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    181 

a  dynasty.  Between  1860  and  1868  he  produced 
the  four  volumes  of  the  History  of  the  United  Nether 
lands.  During  the  Civil  War  he  served  usefully  as 
American  minister  to  Vienna,  and  in  1869  was 
appointed  minister  to  London.  Both  of  these 
appointments  ended  unhappily  for  him.  Dr. 
Holmes,  his  loyal  admirer  and  biographer,  does 
not  conceal  the  fact  that  a  steadier,  less  excitable 
type  of  public  servant  might  have  handled  both 
the  Vienna  situation  and  the  London  situation 
without  incurring  a  recall.  Motley  continued  to 
live  in  England,  where  his  daughters  had  married, 
and  where,  in  spite  of  his  ardent  Americanism,  he 
felt  socially  at  home.  His  last  book  was  The  Life 
and  Death  of  John  of  Barneveld.  His  Letters, 
edited  after  his  death  in  1877  by  George  William 
Curtis,  give  a  fascinating  picture  of  English  life 
among  the  cultivated  and  leisurely  classes.  The 
Boston  merchant's  son  was  a  high-hearted  gentle 
man,  and  his  cosmopolitan  experiences  used  to 
make  his  stay-at-home  friend,  Oliver  Wendell 
Holmes,  feel  rather  dull  and  provincial  in  com 
parison.  Both  were  Sons  of  Liberty,  but  Motley 
had  had  the  luck  to  find  in  "brave  little  Holland" 
a  subject  which  captivated  the  interest  of  Europe 
and  gave  the  historian  international  fame.  He 


182   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

had  more  eloquence  than  the  Doctor,  and  a  far 
more  varied  range  of  prose,  but  there  may  be  here 
and  there  a  Yankee  guesser  about  the  taste  of 
future  generations  who  will  bet  on  The  Autocrat, 
after  all. 

The  character  and  career  of  Francis  Parkman 
afford  curious  material  to  the  student  of  New 
England's  golden  age.  In  the  seventy  years  of  his 
heroic  life,  from  1823  to  1893,  all  the  character 
istic  forces  of  the  age  reached  their  culmination 
and  decline,  and  his  own  personality  indicates 
some  of  the  violent  reactions  produced  by  the 
over-strain  of  Transcendentalism.  For  here  was 
a  descendant  of  John  Cotton,  and  a  clergyman's 
son,  who  detested  Puritanism  and  the  clergy;  who, 
coming  to  manhood  in  the  eighteen-forties,  hated 
the  very  words  Transcendentalism,  Philosophy, 
Religion,  Reform;  an  inheritor  of  property,  trained 
at  Harvard,  and  an  Overseer  and  Fellow  of  his 
University,  who  disliked  the  ideals  of  culture 
and  refinement;  a  member  of  the  Saturday  Club 
who  was  bored  with  literary  talk  and  literary 
people;  a  staunch  American  who  despised  democ 
racy  as  thoroughly  as  Alexander  Hamilton,  and 
thought  suffrage  a  failure;  a  nineteenth  century 
historian  who  cared  nothing  for  philosophy,  science, 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    183 

or  the  larger  lessons  of  history  itself;  a  fascinating 
realistic  writer  who  admired  Scott,  Byron,  and 
Cooper  for  their  tales  of  action,  and  despised 
Wordsworth  and  Thoreau  as  effeminate  sentiment 
alists  who  were  preoccupied  with  themselves.  In 
Parkman  "the  wheel  has  come  full  circle,"  and  a 
movement  that  began  with  expansion  of  self  ended 
in  hard  Spartan  repression,  even  in  inhibition  of 
emotion. 

Becoming  "enamoured  of  the  woods"  at  six 
teen,  Parkman  chose  his  life  work  at  eighteen, 
and  he  was  a  man  who  could  say  proudly:  "I 
have  not  yet  abandoned  any  plan  which  I  ever 
formed."  "Before  the  end  of  the  sophomore 
year, "  he  wrote  in  his  autobiography,  "my  various 
schemes  had  crystallized  into  a  plan  of  wanting 
the  story  of  what  was  then  known  as  the  Old 
French  War,  that  is,  the  war  that  ended  in  the  con 
quest  of  Canada,  for  here,  as  it  seemed  to  me, 
the  forest  drama  was  more  stirring  and  the  forest 
stage  more  thronged  with  appropriate  actors  than 
in  any  other  passage  of  our  history.  It  was  not 
till  some  years  later  that  I  enlarged  the  plan 
to  include  the  whole  course  of  the  American 
conflict  between  France  and  England,  or,  in  other 
wc-rds,  the  history  of  the  American  forest:  for  this 


184  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

was  the  light  in  which  I  regarded  it.  My  theme 
fascinated  me,  and  I  was  haunted  with  wilderness 
images  day  and  night."  To  understand  "the 
history  of  the  American  forest"  young  Parkman 
devoted  his  college  vacations  to  long  trips  in  the 
wilderness,  and  in  1846,  two  years  after  graduation, 
he  made  the  epoch-making  journey  described  in 
his  first  book,  The  Oregon  Trail. 

The  Conspiracy  of  Pontiac,  a  highly-colored 
narrative  in  two  volumes  appearing  in  1851, 
marks  the  first  stage  of  his  historical  writing. 
Then  came  the  tragedy  of  shattered  health,  and 
for  fourteen  years  Parkman  fought  for  life  and 
sanity,  and  produced  practically  nothing.  He 
had  had  to  struggle  from  his  college  days  with  an 
obscure  disorder  of  the  brain,  aggravated  by  the 
hardships  of  his  Oregon  Trail  journey,  and  by  ill- 
considered  efforts  to  harden  his  bodily  frame  by 
over-exertion.  His  disease  took  many  forms — 
insomnia,  arthritis,  weakness  of  sight,  incapacity 
for  sustained  thought.  His  biographer  Farnham 
says  that  "he  never  saw  a  perfectly  well  day  dur 
ing  his  entire  literary  career."  Even  when  aided 
by  secretaries  and  copyists,  six  lines  a  day  was 
often  the  limit  of  his  production.  His  own  Stoic 
words  about  the  limitations  of  his  eyesight  'ire 


ROMANCE,  POETRY,  AND  HISTORY    185 

characteristic:  "By  reading  for  one  minute,  and 
then  resting  for  an  equal  time,  this  alternate 
process  may  gradually  be  continued  for  about 
half  an  hour.  Then,  after  a  sufficient  interval, 
it  may  be  repeated,  often  three  or  four  times  in 
the  course  of  the  day.  By  this  means  nearly  the 
whole  of  the  volume  now  offered  has  been  com 
posed.  "  There  is  no  more  piteous  or  inspiring 
story  of  a  fight  against  odds  in  the  history  of 
literature. 

For  after  his  fortieth  year  the  enemy  gave  way 
a  little,  and  book  after  book  somehow  got  itself 
written.  There  they  stand  upon  the  shelves,  a 
dozen  of  them — The  Pioneers  of  France,  The 
Jesuits  in  North  America,  La  Salle,  The  Old 
Regime,  Frontenac,  Montcalm  and  Wolfe,  A  Half- 
Century  of  Conflict — the  boy's  dream  realized,  the 
man's  long  warfare  accomplished.  The  history  of 
the  forest,  as  Parkman  saw  it,  was  a  pageant  with 
the  dark  wilderness  for  a  background,  and,  for  the 
actors,  taciturn  savages,  black-robed  Jesuits,  in 
trepid  explorers,  soldiers  of  France — all  struggling 
for  a  vast  prize,  all  changing,  passing,  with  a 
pomp  and  color  unknown  to  wearied  Europe.  It 
was  a  superb  theme,  better  after  all  for  an  Ameri 
can  than  the  themes  chosen  by  Prescott  and  Tick- 


186  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

nor  and  Motley,  and  precisely  adapted  to  the 
pictorial  and  narrative  powers  of  the  soldier- 
minded,  soldier-hearted  author. 

The  quality  which  Parkman  admired  most  in 
men  —  though  he  never  seems  to  have  loved  men 
deeply,  even  his  own  heroes  —  was  strength  of  will. 
That  was  the  secret  of  his  own  power,  and  the 
sign,  it  must  be  added,  of  the  limitations  of  this 
group  of  historians  who  came  at  the  close  of  the 
golden  age.  Whatever  a  New  England  will  can 
accomplish  was  wrought  manfully  by  such  admir 
able  men  as  Prescott  and  Parkman.  Trained  in 
telligence,  deliberate  selection  of  subject,  skillful 
cultivation  of  appropriate  story-telling  and  picture- 
painting  style,  all  these  were  theirs.  But  the 
"wild  ecstasy"  that  thrilled  the  young  Emerson 
as  he  crossed  the  bare  Common  at  sunset,  the 
"supernal  beauty"  of  which  Poe  dreamed  in 
the  Fordham  cottage,  the  bay  horse  and  hound 
and  turtle-dove  which  Thoreau  lost  long  ago  and 
could  not  find  in  his  hut  at  Walden,  these  were 
something  which  our  later  Greeks  of  the  New 
England  Athens  esteemed  as  foolishness. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

POE  AND   WHITMAN 

ENTER  now  two  egotists,  who  have  little  in  com 
mon  save  their  egotism,  two  outsiders  who  upset 
most  of  the  conventional  American  rules  for  win 
ning  the  literary  race,  two  men  of  genius,  in 
short,  about  whom  we  are  still  quarreling,  and 
whose  distinctive  quality  is  more  accurately  per 
ceived  in  Europe  than  it  has  ever  been  in  the 
United  States. 

Both  Poe  and  Whitman  were  Romanticists  by 
temperament.  Both  shared  in  the  tradition  and 
influence  of  European  Romanticism.  But  they 
were  also  late  comers,  and  they  were  caught  in  the 
more  morbid  and  extravagant  phases  of  the  great 
European  movement  while  its  current  was  begin 
ning  to  ebb.  Their  acquaintance  with  its  litera 
ture  was  mainly  at  second-hand  and  through  the 
medium  of  British  and  American  periodicals. 
Poe,  who  was  older  than  Whitman  by  ten  years, 

187 


188  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

was  fifteen  when  Byron  died,  in  1824.  He  was 
untouched  by  the  nobler  mood  of  Byron,  though 
his  verse  was  colored  by  the  influence  of  Byron, 
Moore,  and  Shelley.  His  prose  models  were  De 
Quincey,  Disraeli,  and  Bulwer.  Yet  he  owed 
more  to  Coleridge  than  to  any  of  the  Romantics. 
He  was  himself  a  sort  of  Coleridge  without  the 
piety,  with  the  same  keen  penetrating  critical 
intelligence,  the  same  lovely  opium-shadowed 
dreams,  and,  alas,  with  something  of  the  same 
reputation  as  a  dead-beat. 

A  child  of  strolling  players,  Poe  happened  to  be 
born  in  Boston,  but  he  hated  "  Frog-Pondium  " — 
his  favorite  name  for  the  city  of  his  nativity — as 
much  as  Whistler  hated  his  native  town  of  Lowell. 
His  father  died  early  of  tuberculosis,  and  his 
mother,  after  a  pitiful  struggle  with  disease  and  pov 
erty,  soon  followed  her  husband  to  the  grave.  The 
boy,  by  physical  inheritance  a  neurasthenic, 
though  with  marked  bodily  activity  in  youth,  was 
adopted  by  the  Allans,  a  kindly  family  in  Rich 
mond,  Virginia.  Poe  liked  to  think  of  himself  as 
a  Southerner.  He  was  sent  to  school  in  England, 
and  in  1826,  at  seventeen,  he  attended  for  nearly 
a  year  the  newly  founded  University  of  Virginia. 
He  was  a  dark,  short,  bow-legged  boy,  with  the 


POE  AND  WHITMAN  189 

face  of  his  own  Roderick  Usher.  He  made  a  good 
record  in  French  and  Latin,  read,  wrote  and 
recited  poetry,  tramped  on  the  Ragged  Moun 
tains,  and  did  not  notably  exceed  his  companions 
in  drinking  and  gambling.  But  his  Scotch  foster- 
father  disapproved  of  his  conduct  and  withdrew 
him  from  the  University.  A  period  of  wandering 
followed.  He  enlisted  in  the  army  and  was  sta 
tioned  in  Boston  in  1827,  when  his  first  volume, 
Tamerlane,  was  published.  In  1829  he  was  in 
Fortress  Monroe,  and  published  Al  Aaraf  at  Balti 
more.  He  entered  West  Point  in  1830,  and  was 
surely,  except  Whistler,  the  strangest  of  all  possible 
cadets.  When  he  was  dismissed  in  1831,  he  had 
written  the  marvellous  lines  To  Helen,  Israfel, 
and  The  City  in  the  Sea.  That  is  enough  to  have 
in  one's  knapsack  at  the  age  of  twenty-two. 

In  the  eighteen  years  from  1831  to  1849,  when 
Poe's  unhappy  life  came  to  an  end  in  a  Baltimore 
hospital,  his  literary  activity  was  chiefly  that  of  a 
journalist,  critic,  and  short  story  writer.  He  lived 
in  Baltimore,  Richmond,  Philadelphia,  and  New 
York.  Authors  who  now  exploit  their  fat  bar 
gains  with  their  publishers  may  have  forgotten 
that  letter  which  Poe  wrote  back  to  Philadelphia 
the  morning  after  he  arrived  with  his  child-wife  in 


190  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

New  York:  "We  are  both  in  excellent  spirits.  .  .  . 
We  have  now  got  four  dollars  and  a  half  left. 
To-morrow  I  am  going  to  try  and  borrow  three 
dollars,  so  that  I  may  have  a  fortnight  to  go  upon. " 
When  the  child-wife  died  in  the  shabby  cottage 
at  Fordham,  her  wasted  body  was  covered  with  the 
old  army  overcoat  which  Poe  had  brought  from 
West  Point.  If  Poe  met  some  of  the  tests  of 
practical  life  inadequately,  it  must  be  remembered 
that  his  health  failed  at  twenty-five,  that  he  was 
pitiably  poor,  and  that  the  slightest  indulgence 
in  drink  set  his  over- wrought  nerves  jangling. 
Ferguson,  the  former  office-boy  of  the  Literary 
Messenger,  judged  this  man  of  letters  with  an 
office-boy's  firm  and  experienced  eye:  "Mr.  Poe 
was  a  fine  gentleman  when  he  was  sober.  He  was 
ever  kind  and  courtly,  and  at  such  times  every 
one  liked  him.  But  when  he  was  drinking  he  was 
about  one  of  the  most  disagreeable  men  I  have 
ever  met."  "I  am  sorry  for  him,"  wrote  C.  F. 
Briggs  to  Lowell.  "He  has  some  good  points,  but 
taken  altogether,  he  is  badly  made  up."  "Badly 
made  up,"  no  doubt,  both  in  body  and  mind, 
but  all  respectable  and  prosperous  Pharisees 
should  be  reminded  that  Poe  did  not  make  him 
self;  or  rather,  that  he  could  not  make  himself 


POE  AND  WHITMAN  191 

over.  Very  few  men  can.  Given  Poe's  tempera 
ment,  and  the  problem  is  insoluble.  He  wrote 
to  Lowell  in  1844:  "I  have  been  too  deeply  con 
scious  of  the  mutability  and  evanescence  of  tem 
poral  things  to  give  any  continuous  effort  to 
anything  —  to  be  consistent  in  anything.  My  life 
has  been  whim  —  impulse  —  passion  —  a  longing 
for  solitude  —  a  scorn  of  all  things  present  in  an 
earnest  desire  for  the  future.*'  It  is  the  pathetic 
confession  of  a  dreamer.  Yet  this  dreamer  was 
also  a  keen  analyzer,  a  tireless  creator  of  beautiful 
things.  In  them  he  sought  and  found  a  refuge 
from  actuality.  The  marvel  of  his  career  is,  as  I 
have  said  elsewhere,  that  this  solitary,  embittered 
craftsman,  out  of  such  hopeless  material  as  nega 
tions  and  abstractions,  shadows  and  superstitions, 
out  of  disordered  fancies  and  dreams  of  physical 
horror  and  strange  crime,  should  have  wrought 
structures  of  imperishable  beauty. 

Let   us   notice   the   critical   instinct   which   he 
brought  to  the  task  of  creation.     His  theory  of 
verse  is  simple,  in  fact  too  simple  to  account  for 
all  of  the  facts.     The  aim  of  poetry,  according  to  f 
Poe,  is  not  truth  but  pleasure  —  the  rhythmical  ] 
creation  of  beauty.     Poetry  should  be  brief,  indefi 
nite,  and  musical.     Its  chief  instrument  is  sound. 


192  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

A  c^rtaii\  quaintness  or  grotesqueiiess  of  tone  is  a 
means  for  satisfying  the.  thirst  for  supernal  beauty. 
,Henee  the  musical  "lyric  is*  to  Poe  the  only  true 
type  of  poetry ;  a  long  poem  does  not  exist.  Read 
ers  who  respond  more  readily  to  auditory  than 
to  visual  or  motor  stimulus  are  therefore  Poe's 
chosen  audience.  For  them  he  executes,  like 
Paganini,  marvels  upon  his  single  string.  He  has 
easily  recognizable  devices:  the  dominant  note, 
the  refrain,  the  "repetend,"  that  is  to  say  the 
phrase  which  echoes,  with  some  variation,  a  phrase 
or  line  already  used.  In  such  poems  as  To 
Helen,  Israfel,  The  Haunted  Palace,  Annabel  Lee, 
the  theme,  the  tone,  the  melody  all  weave  their 
magic  spell;  it  is  like  listening  to  a  lute-player  in  a 
dream. 

That  the  device  often  turns  into  a  trick  is 
equally  true.  In  The  Bells  and  The  Raven  we 
detect  the  prestidigitator.  It  is  jugglery,  though 
such  juggling  as  only  a  master-musician  can  per 
form.  In  Ulalume  and  other  show-pieces  the 
wires  get  crossed  and  the  charm  snaps,  scattering 
tinsel  fragments  of  nonsense  verse.  Such  are  the 
dangers  of  the  technical  temperament  unenriched 
by  wide  and  deep  contact  with  human  feeling. 

Poe's  theory  of  the  art  of  the  short  story  is 


POE  AND  WHITMAN  193 

now  familiar  enough.  The  power  of  a  tale,  he 
thought,  turned  chiefly  if  not  solely  upon  its  unity, 
its  harmony  of  effect.  This  is  illustrated  in  all 
of  his  finest  stories.  In  The  Fall  of  the  House  of 
Usher  the  theme  is  Fear;  the  opening  sentence 
strikes  the  key  and  the  closing  sentence  contains 
the  climax.  In  the  whole  composition  every  sen 
tence  is  modulated  to  the  one  end  in  view.  The 
autumn  landscape  tones  with  the  melancholy 
house;  the  somber  chamber  frames  the  cadaverous 
face  of  Roderick  Usher;  the  face  is  an  index  of  the 
tumultuous  agitation  of  a  mind  wrestling  with 
the  grim  phantom  Fear  and  awaiting  the  cumu 
lative  horror  of  the  final  moment.  In  Ligeia, 
which  Poe  sometimes  thought  the  best  of  all  his 
tales,  the  theme  is  the  ceaseless  life  of  the  will,  the 
potency  of  the  spirit  of  the  beloved  and  departed 
woman.  The  unity  of  effect  is  absolute,  the 
workmanship  consummate.  So  with  the  theme 
of  revenge  in  The  Cask  of  Amontillado,  the  theme 
of  mysterious  intrigue  in  The  Assignation.  In 
Poe's  detective  stories,  or  tales  of  ratiocination  as 
he  preferred  to  call  them,  he  takes  to  pieces  for 
our  amusement  a  puzzle  which  he  has  cunningly 
put  together.  The  Gold  Bug  is  the  best  known  of 
these,  The  Purloined  Letter  the  most  perfect,  The 


194  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Murders  in  the  Rue  Morgue  the  most  sensa 
tional.  Then  there  are  the  tales  upon  scientific 
subjects  or  displaying  the  pretence  of  scientific 
knowledge,  where  the  narrator  loves  to  pose  as 
a  man  without  imagination  and  with  "habits  of 
rigid  thought. "  And  there  are  tales  of  conscience, 
of  which  The  Black  Cat  is  the  most  fearful  and 
William  Wilson  the  most  subtle;  and  there  are 
landscape  sketches  and  fantasies  and  extrava 
ganzas,  most  of  these  poor  stuff. 

It  is  ungrateful  and  perhaps  unnecessary  to 
dwell  upon  Poe's  limitations.  His  scornful  glance 
caught  certain  aspects  of  the  human  drama 
with  camera-like  precision.  Other  aspects  of 
life,  and  nobler,  he  never  seemed  to  perceive. 
The  human  comedy  sometimes  moved  him  to 
laughter,  but  his  humor  is  impish  and  his  wit 
malign.  His  imagination  fled  from  the  daylight; 
he  dwelt  in  the  twilight  among  the  tombs.  He 
closed  his  eyes  to  dream,  and  could  not  see  the 
green  sunlit  earth,  seed-time  and  harvest,  man 
going  forth  to  his  toil  and  returning  to  his  hearth 
stone,  the  America  that  laughs  as  it  labors.  He 
wore  upon  his  finger  the  magic  ring  and  the  genii 
did  his  bidding.  But  we  could  wish  that  the 
palaces  they  reared  for  him  were  not  in  such  a 


POE  AND  WHITMAN  195 

somber  land,  with  such  infernal  lights  gleaming 
in  their  windows,  and  crowded  with  such  horror- 
haunted  forms.  We  could  wish  that  his  imagin 
ation  dealt  less  often  with  those  primitive  terrors 
that  belong  to  the  childhood  of  our  race.  Yet 
when  his  spell  is  upon  us  we  lapse  back  by  a  sort 
of  atavism  into  primal  savagery  and  shudder  with 
a  recrudescence  of  long  forgotten  fears.  No  doubt 
Poe  was  ignorant  of  life,  in  the  highest  sense.  He 
was  caged  in  by  his  ignorance.  Yet  he  had  beau 
tiful  dusky  wings  that  bruised  themselves  against 
his  prison. 

Poe  was  a  tireless  critic  of  his  own  work,  and 
both  his  standards  of  workmanship  and  his 
critical  precepts  have  been  of  great  service  to 
his  careless  countrymen.  He  turned  out  between 
four  and  five  short  stories  a  year,  was  poorly  paid 
for  them,  and  indeed  found  difficulty  in  selling 
them  at  all.  Yet  he  was  constantly  correcting 
them  for  the  better.  His  best  poems  were  like- 
wise  his  latest.  He  was  tantalized  with  the  desire 
for  artistic  perfection.  He  became  the  path- 
breaker  for  a  long  file  of  men  in  France,  Italy, 
England,  and  America.  He  found  the  way  and 
they  brought  back  the  glory  and  the  cash. 

I  have  sometimes  imagined  Poe,  with  four  other 


196  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

men  and  one  woman,  seated  at  a  dinner-table  laid 
for  six,  and  talking  of  their  art  and  of  themselves. 
What  would  the  others  think  of  Poe?  I  fancy 
that  Thackeray  would  chat  with  him  courteously, 
but  would  not  greatly  care  for  him.  George 
Eliot,  woman-like,  would  pity  him.  Hawthorne 
would  watch  him  with  those  inscrutable  eyes  and 
understand  him  better  than  the  rest.  But  Steven 
son  would  be  immensely  interested;  he  would  begin 
an  essay  on  Poe  before  he  went  to  sleep.  And 
Mr.  Kipling  would  look  sharply  at  him:  he  has 
seen  that  man  before,  in  The  Gate  of  a  Hundred 
Sorrows.  All  of  them  would  find  in  him  some 
thing  to  praise,  a  great  deal  to  marvel  at,  and 
perhaps  not  much  to  love.  And  the  sensitive, 
shabby,  lonely  Poe — what  would  he  think  of  them? 
He  might  not  care  much  for  the  other  guests,  but  I 
think  he  would  say  to  himself  with  a  thrill  of  pride: 

belong  at  this  table."  And  he  does. / 
Walt  Whitman,  whom  his  friend  O'Connor 
dubbed  the  "good  gray  poet,"  offers  a  bizarre 
contrast  to  Edgar  Allan  Poe.  There  was  nothing 
distinctively  American  about  Poe  except  his 
ingenuity;  he  had  no  interest  in  America'n  history 
or  in  American  ideas;  he  was  a  timeless,  placeless 
embodiment  of  technical  artistry.  But  Whitman 


POE  AND  WHITMAN  197 

had  a  passion  for  his  native  soil ;  he  was  hypnotized 
by  the  word  America;  he  spent  much  of  his  mature 
life  in  brooding  over  the  question,  "What,  after  * 
all,  is  an  American,  and  what  should  an  American 
poet  be  in  our  age  of  science  and  democracy?" 
It  is  true  that  he  was  as  untypical  as  Poe  of  the 
average  citizen  of  "these  states."  His  person 
ality  is  unique.  In  many  respects  he  still  baffles 
our  curiosity.  He  repels  many  of  his  countrymen 
without  arousing  the  pity  which  adds  to  their 
romantic  interest  in  Poe.  Whatever  our  literary 
students  may  feel,  and  whatever  foreign  .critics 
may  assert,  it  must  be  acknowledged  that  to  the 
vast  majority  of  American  men  and  women  "good 
old  Walt"  is  still  an  outsider. 

Let  us  try  to  see  first  the  type  of  mind  with 
which  we  are  dealing.     It  is  fundamentally  re-^. 
ligious,  perceiving  the  unity  and  kinship  and  glory 
of  all  created  things.     It  is  this  passion  of  worship  * 
which  inspired  St.  Francis  of  Assisi's  Canticle  to  the 
Sun.     It  cries,  "Benedicite,  Omnia  opera  Domini: 
All  ye  Green  Things  upon  the  Earth,  bless  ye  the 
Lord!"     That  is  the  real  motto   for   Whitman's  " 
Leaves  of  Grass.     Like  St.  Francis,  and  like  his 
own  immediate  master,  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson, 
Whitman    is    a    mystic.     He    cannot    argue    the 


s 


198    AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

ultimate  questions;  he  asserts  them.  Instead  of 
marshaling  and  sifting  the  proofs  for  immortality, 
he  chants  "I  know  I  am  deathless."  Like  Emer- 
'  son  again,  Whitman  shares  that  peculiarly  Ameri 
can  type  of  mysticism  known  as  Transcendentalism, 
but  he  came  at  the  end  of  this  movement  instead  of 
at  the  beginning  of  it.  In  his  Romanticism,  like 
wise,  he  is  an  end  of  an  era  figure.  His  affiliations 
with  Victor  Hugo  are  significant;  and  a  volume  of 
Scott's  poems  which  he  owned  at  the  age  of  six 
teen  became  his  "inexhaustible  mine  and  treasury 
for  more  than  sixty  years."  Finally,  and  quite  as 
uncompromisingly  as  Emerson,  Thoreau,  and  Poe, 
Whitman  is  an  individualist.  He  represents  the 
assertive,  Jacksonian  period  of  our  national  exist 
ence.  In  a  thousand  similes  he  makes  a  declara- 
tion  of  independence  for  the  separate  person,  the 
"single  man"  of  Emerson's  Phi  Beta  Kappa 
address.  "I  wear  my  hat  as  I  please,  indoors 
and  out."  Sometimes  this  is  mere  swagger. 
Sometimes  it  is  superb. 

So  much  for  the  type.  Let  us  turn  next  to  the 
story  of  Whitman's  life.  It  must  here  be  told  in 
the  briefest  fashion,  for  Whitman's  own  prose  and 
poetry  relate  the  essentials  of  his  biography.  He 
was  born  on  Long  Island,  of  New  England  and 


POE  AND  WHITMAN  199 

Dutch  ancestry,  in  1819.  Lowell,  W.  W.  Story, 
and  Charles  A.  Dana  were  born  in  that  year,  as 
was  also  George  Eliot.  Whitman's  father  was  a 
carpenter,  who  "leaned  to  the  Quakers."  There 
were  many  children.  When  little  "Walt" — as  he 
was  called,  to  distinguish  him  from  his  father, 
Walter — was  four,  the  family  moved  to  Brooklyn. 
The  boy  had  scanty  schooling,  and  by  the  time  he 
was  twenty  had  tried  type-setting,  teaching,  and 
editing  a  country  newspaper  on  Long  Island.  He 
was  a  big,  dark-haired  fellow,  sensitive,  emotional, 
extraordinarily  impressible. 

The  next  sixteen  years  were  full  of  happy 
vagrancy.  At  twenty-two  he  was  editing  a  paper 
in  New  York,  and  furnishing  short  stories  to  the 
Democratic  Review,  a  literary  journal  which  num 
bered  Bryant,  Longfellow,  Whittier,  Poe,  Haw 
thorne,  and  Thoreau  among  its  contributors.  He 
wrote  a  novel  on  temperance,  "mostly  in  the 
reading-room  of  Tammany  Hall,"  and  tried  here 
and  there  an  experiment  in  free  verse.  He  was  in 
love  with  the  pavements  of  New  York  and  the 
Brooklyn  ferry-boats,  in  love  with  Italian  opera 
and  with  long  tramps  over  Long  Island.  He  left 
his  position  on  The  Brooklyn  Eagle  and  wandered 
south  to  New  Orleans.  By  and  by  he  drifted  back 


200  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

to  New  York,  tried  lecturing,  worked  at  the  car 
penter's  trade  with  his  father,  and  brooded  over 
a  book — "a  book  of  new  things. " 

This  was  the  famous  Leaves  of  Grass.     He  set 
the  type    himself,  in  a  Brooklyn  printing-office, 
K  and   printed   about   eight   hundred   copies.     The 
y   book  had  a  portrait  of  the  author  —  a  meditative, 
Sy  gray-bearded  poet  in  workman's  clothes  —  and  a 
^confused  preface  on  America  as  a  field  for  the 
true   poet.     Then   followed   the  new  gospel,    "I 
celebrate  myself,"  chanted  in  long  lines  of  free 
verse,    whose    patterns    perplexed    contemporary 
readers.     For   the   most  part   it   was   passionate 
speech  rather  than  song,  a  rhapsodical  declamation 
in  hybrid  rhythms.     Very  few  people  bought  the 
book   or   pretended   to  understand  what   it  was 
all    about.      Some  were    startled    by  the    frank 
sexuality  of  certain  poems.     But  Emerson  wrote 
to  Whitman  from  Concord:   "I  find  it  the  most 
extraordinary    piece    of    wit    and    wisdom    that 
America  has  yet  contributed." 

Until  the  Civil  War  was  half  over,  Whitman 
remained  in  Brooklyn,  patiently  composing  new 
poems  for  successive  printings  of  his  book.  Then 
he  went  to  the  front  to  care  for  a  wounded  brother, 
and  finally  settled  down  in  a  Washington  garret 


POE  AND  WHITMAN  201 

to  spend  his  strength  as  an  army  hospital  nurse. 
He  wrote  Drum  Taps  and  other  magnificent 
poems  about  the  War,  culminating  in  his  threnody 
on  Lincoln's  death,  When  Lilacs  last  in  the  Door- 
yard  Bloorned.  Swinburne  called  this  "the  most 
sonorous  nocturn  ever  chanted  in  the  church  of 
the  world. "  After  the  war  had  ended,  Whitman 
stayed  on  in  Washington  as  a  government  clerk, 
and  saw  much  of  John  Burroughs  and  W.  D. 
O'Connor.  John  Hay  was  a  staunch  friend. 
Some  of  the  best  known  poets  and  critics  of 
England  and  the  Continent  now  began  to  recog 
nize  his  genius.  But  his  health  had  been  per 
manently  shattered  by  his  heroic  service  as  a  nurse, 
and  in  1873  he  suffered  a  paralytic  stroke  which 
forced  him  to  resign  his  position  in  Washington 
and  remove  to  his  brother's  home  in  Camden,  New 
Jersey. 

He  was  only  fifty-four,  but  his  best  work  was 
already  done,  and  his  remaining  years,  until  his 
death  in  1892,  were  those  of  patient  and  serene 
invalidism.  He  wrote  some  fascinating  prose  in 
this  final  period,  and  his  cluttered  chamber  in 
Camden  became  the  shrine  of  many  a  literary  pil 
grim,  among  them  some  of  the  foremost  men  of 
Betters  of  this  country  and  of  Europe.  He  was 


202  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

cared  for  by  loyal  friends.  Occasionally  he 
appeared  in  public,  a  magnificent  gray  figure  of 
a  man.  And  then,  at  seventy-three,  the  "Dark 
mother  always  gliding  near"  enfolded  him. 

There  are  puzzling  things  in  the  physical  and 
moral  constitution  of  Walt  Whitman,  and  the 
obstinate  questions  involved  in  his  theory  of 
poetry  and  in  his  actual  poetical  performance  are 
still  far  from  solution.  But  a  few  points  concern 
ing  him  are  by  this  time  fairly  clear.  They  must 
be  swiftly  summarized. 

The  first  obstacle  to  the  popular  acceptance  of 
Walt  Whitman  is  the  formlessness  or  alleged 
formlessness  of  Leaves  of  Grass.  This  is  a  highly 
technical  question,  involving  a  more  accurate 
notation  than  has  thus  far  been  made  of  the 
patterns  and  tunes  of  free  verse  and  of  emotional 
prose.  Whitman's  "new  and  national  declama 
tory  expression,"  as  he  termed  it,  cannot  receive 
a  final  technical  valuation  until  we  have  made 
more  scientific  progress  in  the  analysis  of  rhythms. 
As  regards  the  contents  of  his  verse,  it  is  plain  that 
he  included  much  material  unfused  and  untrans- 
formed  by  emotion.  These  elements  foreign  to 
the  nature  of  poetry  clog  many  of  his  lines.  The 
enumerated  objects  in  his  catalogue  or  inventory 


POE  AND  WHITMAN  203 

poems  often  remain  inert  objects  only.  Like 
many  mystics,  he  was  hypnotized  by  external 
phenomena,  and  he  often  fails  to  communicate  to 
his  reader  the  trance-like  emotion  which  he  himself 
experienced.  This  imperfect  transfusion  of  his 
material  is  a  far  more  significant  defect  in  Whit 
man's  poetry  than  the  relatively  few  passages 
of  unashamed  sexuality  which  shocked  the  Ameri 
can  public  in  1855. 

The  gospel  or  burden  of  Leaves  of  Grass  is  no 
more  difficult  of  comprehension  than  the  general 
drift  of  Emerson's  essays,  which  helped  to  inspire 
it.  The  starting-point  of  the  book  is  a  mystical 
illumination  regarding  the  unity  and  blessedness 
of  the  universe,  an  insight  passing  understanding, 
but  based  upon  the  revelatory  experience  of  love. 
In  the  light  of  this  experience,  all  created  things 
are  recognized  as  divine.  The  starting-point  and 
center  of  the  Whitman  world  is  the  individual 
man,  the  "strong  person,"  imperturbable  in  mind, 
athletic  in  body,  unconquerable,  and  immortal. 
Such  individuals  meet  in  comradeship,  and  pass 
together  along  the  open  roads  of  the  world.  No 
one  is  excluded  because  of  his  poverty  or  his  sins; 
there  is  room  in  the  ideal  America  for  everybody 
except  the  doubter  and  sceptic.  Whitman  does 


204  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

not  linger  over  the  smaller  groups  of  human  so 
ciety,  like  the  family.  He  is  not  a  fireside  poet. 
He  passes  directly  from  his  strong  persons,  meeting 
freely  on  the  open  road,  to  his  conception  of  "these 
States. "  One  of  his  typical  visions  of  the  breadth 
and  depth  and  height  of  America  will  be  found  in 
By  Blue  Ontario's  Shore.  In  this  and  in  many 
similar  rhapsodies  Whitman  holds  obstinately  to 
what  may  be  termed  the  three  points  of  his  national 
creed.  The  first  is  the  newness  of  America,  and  its 
expression  is  in  his  well-known  chant  of  Pioneers, 
0  Pioneers.  Yet  this  new  America  is  subtly  re 
lated  to  the  past;  and  in  Whitman's  later  poems, 
such  as  Passage  to  India,  the  spiritual  kinship  of 
orient  and  Occident  is  emphasized.  The  second 
article  of  the  creed  is  the  unity  of  America.  Here 
he  voices  the  conceptions  of  Hamilton,  Clay,  Web 
ster,  and  Lincoln.  In  spite  of  all  diversity  in 
external  aspects  the  republic  is  "one  and  indivis 
ible."  This  unity,  in  Whitman's  view,  was 
cemented  forever  by  the  issue  of  the  Civil  War. 
Lincoln,  the  "Captain,"  dies  indeed  on  the  deck 
of  the  "victor  ship,"  but  the  ship  comes  into  the 
harbor  "with  object  won."  Third  and  finally, 
Whitman  insists  upon  the  solidarity  of  America 
with  all  countries  of  the  globe.  Particularly  in  his 


POE  AND  WHITMAN  205 

yearning  and  thoughtful  old  age,  the  poet  perceived 
that  humanity  has  but  one  heart  and  that  it  should 
have  but  one  will.  No  American  poet  has  ever 
prophesied  so  directly  and  powerfully  concerning 
the  final  issue  involved  in  that  World  War  which 
he  did  not  live  to  see. 

Whitman,  like  Poe,  had  defects  of  character  and 
defects  of  art.  His  life  and  work  raise  many  prob 
lems  which  will  long  continue  to  fascinate  and  to 
baffle  the  critics.  But  after  all  of  them  have  had 
their  say,  it  will  remain  true  that  he  was  a  seer 
and  a  prophet,  far  in  advance  of  his  own  time,  like 
Lincoln,  and  like  Lincoln,  an  inspired  interpreter  of 
the  soul  of  this  republic. 


CHAPTER  IX 

UNION   AND    LIBERTY 

"THERE  is  what  I  call  the  American  idea,"  de 
clared  Theodore  Parker  in  the  Anti-Slavery  Con 
vention  of  1850.  "This  idea  demands,  as  the 
proximate  organization  thereof,  a  democracy — 
that  is,  a  government  of  all  the  people,  by  all  the 
people,  for  all  the  people;  of  course,  a  government 
on  the  principle  of  eternal  justice,  the  unchanging 
law  of  God;  for  shortness'  sake,  I  will  call  it  the 
idea  of  Freedom. " 

These  are  noble  words,  and  they  are  thought 
to  have  suggested  a  familiar  phrase  of  Lincoln's 
Gettysburg  Address,  thirteen  years  later.  Yet 
students  of  literature,  no  less  than  students  of 
politics,  recognize  the  difficulty  of  summarizing 
in  words  a  national  "idea."  Precisely  what  was 
the  Greek  "idea"?  What  is  today  the  French 
"idea"?  No  single  formula  is  adequate  to  express 
such  a  complex  of  fact,  theories,  moods  —  not  even 

206 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  207 

the  famous  "Liberty,  Fraternity,  Equality." 
The  existence  of  a  truly  national  life  and  literature 
presupposes  a  certain  degree  of  unity,  an  integra 
tion  of  race,  language,  political  institutions,  and 
social  ideals.  It  is  obvious  that  this  problem  of 
national  integration  meets  peculiar  obstacles  in 
the  United  States.  Divergencies  of  race,  tradition, 
and  social  theory,  and  clashing  interests  of  differ 
ent  sections  have  been  felt  from  the  beginning  of 
the  nation's  life.  There  was  well-nigh  complete 
solidarity  in  the  single  province  of  New  England 
during  a  portion  of  the  seventeenth  century,  and 
under  the  leadership  of  the  great  Virginians  there 
was  sufficient  national  fusion  to  make  the  Revolu 
tion  successful.  But  early  in  the  nineteenth 
century,  the  opening  of  the  new  West,  and  the 
increasing  economic  importance  of  Slavery  as  a 
peculiar  institution  of  the  South,  provoked  again 
the  ominous  question  of  the  possibility  of  an  endur 
ing  Union.  From  1820  until  the  end  of  the  Civil 
War,  it  was  the  chief  political  issue  of  the  United 
States.  The  aim  of  the  present  chapter  is  to  show 
how  the  theme  of  Union  and  Liberty  affected  our 
literature. 

To  appreciate  the  significance  of  this  theme  we 
must  remind  ourselves  again  of  what  many  per- 


208  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

sons  have  called  the  civic  note  in  our  national 
writing.  Franklin  exemplified  it  in  his  day.  It 
is  far  removed  from  the  pure  literary  art  of  a  Poe, 
a  Hawthorne,  a  Henry  James.  It  aims  at  action 
rather  than  beauty.  It  seeks  to  persuade,  to 
convince,  to  bring  things  to  pass.  We  shall  ob 
serve  it  in  the  oratory  of  Clay  and  Webster,  as 
they  pleaded  for  compromise;  in  the  editorials  of 
Garrison,  a  foe  to  compromise  and  like  Calhoun  an 
advocate,  if  necessary,  of  disunion;  in  the  epoch- 
making  novel  of  Harriet  Beecher  Stowe;  in  the 
speeches  of  Wendell  Phillips,  in  verse  white-hot 
with  political  passion,  and  sermons  blazing  with  the 
fury  of  attack  and  defense  of  principles  dear  to 
the  human  heart.  We  must  glance,  at  least,  at  the 
lyrics  produced  by  the  war  itself,  and  finally,  we 
shall  observe  how  Abraham  Lincoln,  the  inheritor 
of  the  ideas  of  Jefferson,  Clay,  and  Webster,  per 
ceives  and  maintains,  in  the  noblest  tones  of  our 
civic  speech,  the  sole  conditions  of  our  continu 
ance  as  a  nation. 

Let  us  begin  with  oratory,  an  American  habit, 
and,  as  many  besides  Dickens  have  thought,  an 
American  defect.  W7e  cannot  argue  that  question 
adequately  here.  It  is  sufficient  to  say  that  in  the 
pioneer  stages  of  our  existence  oratory  was  neces- 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  209 

sary  as  a  stimulus  to  communal  thought  and  feel 
ing.  The  speeches  of  Patrick  Henry  and  Samuel 
Adams  were  as  essential  to  our  winning  independ 
ence  as  the  sessions  of  statesmen  and  the  armed 
conflicts  in  the  field.  And  in  that  new  West  which 
came  so  swiftly  and  dramatically  into  existence  at 
the  close  of  the  Revolution,  the  orator  came  to  be 
regarded  as  the  normal  type  of  intellectual  leader 
ship.  The  stump  grew  more  potent  than  school- 
house  and  church  and  bench. 

The  very  pattern,  and,  if  one  likes,  the  tragic 
victim  of  this  glorification  of  oratory  was  Henry 
Clay,  "Harry  of  the  West,"  the  glamour  of  whose 
name  and  the  wonderful  tones  of  whose  voice 
became  for  a  while  a  part  of  the  political  system  of 
the  United  States.  Union  and  Liberty  were  the 
master-passions  of  Clay's  life,  but  the  greater  of 
these  was  Union.  The  half -educated  young  im 
migrant  from  Virginia  hazarded  his  career  at  the 
outset  by  championing  Anti-Slavery  in  the  Ken 
tucky  Constitutional  Convention;  the  last  notable 
act  of  his  life  was  his  successful  management,  at 
the  age  of  seventy-three,  of  the  futile  Compromise 
of  1850.  All  his  life  long  he  fought  for  national 
issues;  for  the  War  of  1812,  for  a  protective  tariff 
and  an  "American  system,"  for  the  Missouri 


210  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Compromise  of  1820  as  a  measure  for  national 
safety;  and  he  had  plead  generously  for  the  young 
South  American  republics  and  for  struggling 
Greece.  He  had  become  the  perpetual  candidate 
of  his  party  for  the  Presidency,  and  had  gone  down 
again  and  again  in  unforeseen  and  heart-rending 
defeat.  Yet  he  could  say  honorably:  "If  anyone 
desires  to  know  the  leading  and  paramount  object 
of  my  public  life,  the  preservation  of  this  union 
will  furnish  him  the  key."  One  could  wish  that 
the  speeches  of  this  fascinating  American  were 
more  readable  today.  They  seem  thin,  facile,  full 
of  phrases  —  such  adroit  phrases  as  would  catch  the 
ear  of  a  listening,  applauding  audience.  Straight, 
hard  thinking  was  not  the  road  to  political  prefer 
ment  in  Clay's  day.  Calhoun  had  that  power,  as 
Lincoln  had  it.  Webster  had  the  capacity  for  it, 
although  he  was  too  indolent  to  employ  his  great 
gifts  steadily.  Yet  it  was  Webster  who  analyzed 
kindly  and  a  little  sadly,  'for  he  was  talking  during 
Clay's  last  illness  and  just,  before  his  own,  his  old 
rival's  defect  in  literary  quality:  "He  was  never  a 
man  of  books ....  I  could  never  imagine  him 
sitting  comfortably  in  his  library  and  reading 
quietly  out  of  the  great  books  of  the  past.  He  has 
been  too  fond  of  excitement  —  he  has  lived  upon  it; 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  211 

he  has  been  too  fond  of  company,  not  enough 
alone;  and  has  had  few  resources  within  himself." 
Were  the  limitations  of  a  typical  oratorical  tem 
perament  ever  touched  more  unerringly  than  in 
these  words? 

When  Webster  himself  thundered,  at  the  close 
of  his  reply  to  Hayne  in  1830,  "Union  and  Liberty, 
now  and  forever,  one  and  inseparable,"  the  words 
sank  deeper  into  the  consciousness  of  the  American 
people  than  any  similar  sentiment  uttered  by 
Henry  Clay.  For  Webster's  was  the  richer,  fuller 
nature,  nurtured  by  "the  great  books  of  the  past," 
brooding,  as  Lincoln  was  to  brood  later,  over  the 
seemingly  insoluble  problem  of  preserving  a  union 
of  States  half  slave,  half  free.  On  the  fateful 
seventh  of  March,  1850,  Webster,  like  Clay,  cast 
the  immense  weight  of  his  personality  and  prestige 
upon  the  side  of  compromise.  It  was  the  ruin  of 
his  political  fortune,  for  the  mood  of  the  North 
was  changing,  and  the  South  preferred  other  can 
didates  for  the  Presidency.  Yet  the  worst  that 
can  fairly  be  said  against  that  speech  today  is  that 
it  lacked  moral  imagination  to  visualize,  as  Mrs. 
Stowe  was  soon  to  visualize,  the  human  results  of 
slavery.  As  a  plea  for  the  transcendent  necessity 
of  maintaining  the  old  Union  it  was  consistent 


212   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

with   Webster's   whole   development   of  political 
thought. 

What  were  the  secrets  of  that  power  that  held 
Webster's  hearers  literally  spellbound,  and  made 
the  North  think  of  him,  after  that  alienation  of 
1850,  as  a  fallen  angel?  No  one  can  say  fully,  for 
we  touch  here  the  mysteries  of  personality  and  of 
the  spoken  word.  But  enough  survives  from  the 
W7ebster  legend,  from  his  correspondence  and 
political  and  legal  oratory,  to  bring  us  into  the 
presence  of  a  superman.  The  dark  Titan  face, 
painted  by  such  masters  as  Carlyle,  Hawthorne, 
and  Emerson;  the  magical  voice,  remembered  now 
but  by  a  few  old  men;  the  bodily  presence,  with  its 
leonine  suggestion  of  sleepy  power  only  half  put 
forth — these  aided  Wrebster  to  awe  men  or  allure 
them  into  personal  idolatry.  Yet  outside  of  New 
England  he  was  admired  rather  than  loved.  There 
is  still  universal  recognition  of  the  mental  capacity 
of  this  foremost  lawyer  and  foremost  statesman 
of  his  time.  He  was  unsurpassed  in  his  skill  for 
direct,  simple,  limpid  statement;  but  he  could  rise 
at  will  to  a  high  Roman  stateiiness  of  diction,  a 
splendid  sonorousness  of  cadence.  His  greatest 
public  appearances  were  in  the  Dartmouth  College 
Case  before  the  Supreme  Court,  the  Plymouth, 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  213 

Bunker  Hill,  and  Adams-Jefferson  commemora 
tive  orations,  the  Reply  to  Hayne,  and  the  Seventh 
of  March  speeches  in  the  Senate.  Though  he  ex 
hibited  in  his  private  life  something  of  the  prodigal 
recklessness  of  the  pioneer,  his  mental  opera 
tions  were  conservative,  constructive.  His  life 
long  antagonist  Calhoun  declared  that  "The 
United  States  are  not  a  nation."  Webster,  in 
opposition  to  this  theory  of  a  confederation  of 
states,  devoted  his  superb  talents  to  the  demon 
stration  of  the  thesis  that  the  United  States  "is," 
not  "are."  Thus  he  came  to  be  known  as  the 
typical  expounder  of  the  Constitution.  When  he 
reached,  in  1850,  the  turning-point  of  his  career, 
his  countrymen  knew  by  heart  his  personal  and 
political  history,  the  New  Hampshire  boyhood  and 
education,  the  rise  to  mastery  at  the  New  England 
bar,  the  service  in  the  House  of  Representatives 
and  the  Senate  and  as  Secretary  of  State.  His 
speeches  were  already  in  the  schoolbooks,  and  for 
twenty  years  boys  had  been  declaiming  his  argu 
ments  against  nullification.  He  had  helped  to 
teach  America  to  think  and  to  feel.  Indeed  it  was 
through  his  oratory  that  many  of  his  fellow-citi 
zens  had  gained  their  highest  conception  of  the 
beauty,  the  potency,  and  the  dignity  of  human 


214  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

speech.  And  in  truth  he  never  exhibited  his  logi 
cal  power  and  demonstrative  skill  more  superbly 
than  in  the  plea  of  the  seventh  of  March  for  the 
preservation  of  the  status  quo,  for  the  avoidance  of 
mutual  recrimination  between  North  and  South, 
for  obedience  to  the  law  of  the  land.  It  was  his 
supreme  effort  to  reconcile  an  irreconcilable 
situation. 

It  failed,  as  we  know.  Whittier,  Emerson, 
Theodore  Parker,  and  indeed  most  of  the  voters  of 
New  England,  believed  that  Webster  had  bartered 
his  private  convictions  in  the  hope  of  securing  the 
Presidential  nomination  in  1852.  They  assailed 
him  savagely,  and  Webster  died,  a  broken  man,  in 
the  autumn  of  the  Presidential  year.  "I  have 
given  my  life  to  law  and  politics,"  he  wrote  to 
Professor  Silliman.  "Law  is  uncertain  and  poli 
tics  are  utterly  vain."  The  dispassionate  judg 
ment  of  the  present  hour  frees  him  from  the  charge 
of  conscious  treachery  to  principle.  He  was  rather 
a  martyr  to  his  own  conception  of  the  obligations 
imposed  by  nationality.  When  these  obligations 
run  counter  to  human  realities,  the  theories  of 
statesmen  must  give  way.  Emerson  could  not 
refute  that  logic  of  Webster's  argument  for  the 
Fugitive  Slave  Law,  but  he  could  at  least  record 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  215 

in  his  private  Journal:  "7  will  not  obey  it,  by  God!" 
So  said  hundreds  of  thousands  of  obscure  men  in 
the  North,  but  Webster  did  not  or  could  not  hear 
them. 

While  no  other  orator  of  that  period  was  so  richly 
endowed  as  Daniel  Webster,  the  struggle  for  Union 
and  Liberty  enlisted  on  both  sides  many  eloquent 
men.  John  C.  Calhoun's  acute,  ingenious,  mas 
terly  political  theorizing  can  still  be  studied  in 
speeches  that  have  lost  little  of  their  effectiveness 
through  the  lapse  of  time.  The  years  have  dealt 
roughly  with  Edward  Everett,  once  thought  to  be 
the  pattern  of  oratorical  gifts  and  graces.  In 
commemorative  oratory,  indeed,  he  ranked  with 
Webster,  but  the  dust  is  settling  upon  his  learned 
and  ornate  pages.  Rufus  Choate,  another  con 
servative  Whig  in  politics,  and  a  leader,  like  Wirt 
and  Pinkney*  at  the  bar,  had  an  exotic,  almost 
Oriental  fancy,  a  gorgeousness  of  diction,  and  an 
intensity  of  emotion  unrivaled  among  his  con 
temporaries.  His  Dartmouth  College  eulogy  of 
Webster  in  1853  shows  him  at  his  best.  The  Anti- 
Slavery  orators,  on  the  other  hand,  had  the  ad 
vantage  of  a  specific  moral  issue  in  which  they  led 
the  attack.  Wendell  Phillips  was  the  most  pol 
ished,  the  most  consummate  in  his  air  of  informal 


216  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

ity,  and  his  example  did  much  to  puncture  the 
American  tradition  of  high-flown  oratory.  He  was 
an  expert  in  virulent  denunciation,  passionately 
unfair  beneath  his  mask  of  conversational  decorum, 
an  aristocratic  demagogue.  He  is  still  distrusted 
and  hated  by  the  Brahmin  class  of  his  own  city, 
still  adored  by  the  children  and  grandchildren  of 
slaves.  Charles  Sumner,  like  Edward  Everett, 
seems  sinking  into  popular  oblivion,  in  spite  of  the 
statues  and  portraits  and  massive  volumes  of 
erudite  and  caustic  and  high-minded  orations.  He 
may  be  seen  at  his  best  in  such  books  as  Long 
fellow's  Journal  and  Correspondence  and  the  Life 
and  Letters  of  George  Ticknor.  There  one  has 
a  pleasant  picture  of  a  booklover,  traveler,  and 
friend.  But  in  his  public  speech  he  was  arrogant, 
unsympathetic,  domineering.  "Sumner  is  my 
idea,  of  a  bishop,"  said  Lincoln  tentatively. 
There  are  bishops  and  bishops,  however,  and  if 
Henry  Ward  Beecher,  whom  Lincoln  and  hosts  of 
other  Americans  admired,  had  only  belonged  to  the 
Church  of  England,  what  an  admirable  Victorian 
bishop  he  might  have  made!  Perhaps  his  best 
service  to  the  cause  of  union  was  rendered  by  his 
speeches  in  England,  where  he  fairly  mobbed  the 
mob  and  won  them  by  his  wit,  courage,  and  by 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  217 

his  appeal  to  the  instinct  of  fair  play.  Beecher's 
oratory,  in  and  out  of  the  pulpit,  was  tempera 
mental,  sentimental  in  the  better  sense,  and 
admirably  human  in  all  its  instincts.  He  had  an 
immense  following,  not  only  in  political  and  hu 
manitarian  fields,  but  as  a  lovable  type  of  the 
everyday  American  who  can  say  undisputed  things 
not  only  solemnly,  if  need  be,  but  by  preference 
with  an  infectious  smile.  The  people  who  loved 
Mr.  Beecher  are  the  people  who  understand  Mr. 
Bryan. 

Foremost  among  the  journalists  of  the  great 
debate  were  William  Lloyd  Garrison  and  Horace 
Greeley.  Garrison  was  a  perfect  example  of  the 
successful  journalist  as  described  by  Zola  —  the 
man  who  keeps  on  pounding  at  a  single  idea  until 
he  has  driven  it  into  the  head  of  the  public.  Every 
one  knows  at  least  the  sentence  from  his  salutatory 
editorial  in  The  Liberator  on  January  1,  1831:  "I 
am  in  earnest — I  will  not  retreat  a  single  inch— 
And  I  will  be  heard."  He  kept  this  vow,  and  he 
also  kept  the  accompanying  and  highly  charac 
teristic  promise:  "I  will  be  as  harsh  as  truth  and  as 
uncompromising  as  justice.  On  this  subject,  I  do 
not  wish  to  think,  or  write,  or  speak,  with  modera 
tion.  "  But  there  would  be  little  political  litera- 


218  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

ture  in  the  world  if  its  production  were  entrusted 
to  the  moderate  type  of  man,  and  the  files  of  The 
Liberator,  though  certainly  harsh  and  full  of  all 
uncharitableness  towards  slave-owners,  make  ex 
cellent  reading  for  the  twentieth  century  American 
who  perceives  that  in  spite  of  the  triumph  of 
emancipation,  in  which  Garrison  had  his  fair  share 
of  glory,  many  aspects  of  our  race-problem  remain 
unsolved.  Horace  Greeley,  the  founder  and  edi 
tor  of  the  New  York  Tribune,  was  a  farmer's  boy 
who  learned  early  to  speak  and  write  the  vocabu 
lary  of  the  plain  people.  Always  interested  in  new 
ideas,  even  in  Transcendentalism  and  Fourierism, 
his  courage  and  energy  and  journalistic  vigor  gave 
him  leadership  in  the  later  phases  of  the  movement 
for  enfranchisement.  He  did  not  hesitate  to 
offer  unasked  advice  to  Lincoln  on  many  occa 
sions,  and  Lincoln  enriched  our  literature  by  his 
replies.  Greeley  had  his  share  of  faults  and  fatui 
ties,  but  in  his  best  days  he  had  an  impressively 
loyal  following  among  both  rural  and  city-bred 
readers  of  his  paper,  and  he  remains  one  of  the  best 
examples  of  that  obsolescent  personal  journalism 
which  is  destined  to  disappear  under  modern 
conditions  of  newspaper  production.  Readers 
really  used  to  care  for  "what  Greeley  said"  and 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  219 

"Dana  said"  and  "Sam  Bowles  said,"  and  all  of 
these  men,  with  scores  of  others,  have  left  their 
stamp  upon  the  phrases  and  the  tone  of  our 
political  writing. 

In  the  concrete  issue  of  Slavery,  however,  it 
must  be  admitted  that  the  most  remarkable  liter 
ary  victory  was  scored,  not  by  any  orator  or  journ 
alist,  but  by  an  almost  unknown  little  woman,  the 
author  of  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin.  No  American  novel 
has  had  so  curious  a  history  and  so  great  or  so 
immediate  an  influence  in  this  country  and  in 
Europe.  In  spite  of  all  that  has  been  written 
about  it,  its  author's  purpose  is  still  widely  mis 
understood,  particularly  in  the  South,  and  the 
controversy  over  this  one  epoch-making  novel  has 
tended  to  obscure  the  literary  reputation  which 
Mrs.  Stowe  won  by  her  other  books. 

Harriet  Beecher,  the  daughter  and  the  sister 
of  famous  clergymen,  was  born  in  Litchfield,  Con 
necticut,  in  1811.  For  seventeen  years,  from  1832 
to  1849,  she  lived  in  the  border  city  of  Cincinnati, 
within  sight  of  slave  territory,  and  in  daily  contact 
with  victims  of  the  slave  system.  While  her  sym 
pathies,  like  those  of  her  father  Lyman  Beecher, 
were  anti-slavery,  she  was  not  an  Abolitionist  in 
the  Garrisonian  sense  of  that  word.  At  twenty- 


220  AME^IfAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

five  she  had  married  a  widowed  professor,  Calvin 
Stowe,  to  whom  she  bore  many  children.  She  had 
written  a  few  sketches  of  New  England  life,  and 
her  family  thought  her  a  woman  of  genius.  Such 
was  the  situation  in  the  winter  of  1849-1850,  when 
Stowd^  migrated  to  Brunswick,  Maine,  where 
had  been  appointed  to  a  chair  at 
Pitiably  poor,  and  distracted  by  house 
hold  direft  which  she  had  to  face  single-handed — 
for  the  Professor  was  a  "feckless  body" — Mrs. 
Stowe  nevertheless  could  not  be  indifferent  to  the 
national  crisis  over  the  Fugitive  Slave  Law.  She 
had  seen  its  working.  When  her  sister-in-law 
wrote  to  her:  "If  I  could  use  a  pen  as  you  can, 
I  would  write  something  that  would  make  this 
whole  nation  feel  what  an  accursed  thing  slavery 
is, "  Mrs.  Stowe  exclaimed :  "  God  helping  me,  I  will 
write  something;  I  will  if  I  live." 

Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  begun  in  the  spring  of  1850, 
was  a  woman's  answer  to  Webster's  seventh  of 
March  speech.  Its  object  was  plainly  stated  to 
be  "to  awaken  sympathy  and  feeling  for  the  Afri 
can  race;  to  show  their  wrongs  and  sorrows,  under 
a  system  so  necessarily  cruel  and  unjust  as  to 
defeat  and  do  away  the  good  effects  of  all  that  can 
be  attempted  for  them,  by  their  best  friends  under 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  *  221 

4 

it."  The  book  was  permeated  with  what  we  now 
call  the  1848  anti-aristocratic  sentiment,  the  direct 
heritage  of  the  French  Revolution.  "There  is  a 
dies  iroe  coming  on,  sooner  or  later,"  admits  St. 
Clare  in  the  story.  "The  same  thing  is  working, 
in  Europe,  in  England,  and  in  this  Country,  "i 
There  was  no  sectional  hostility  in  Mrs.  Stowe's 
heart.  "The  people  of  the  free  states  have  der 
fended,  encouraged,  and  participated  [in.  slavery] ; 
and  are  more  guilty  for  it,  before  God,  than  the 
South,  in  that  they  have  not  the  apology  of  educa 
tion  or  custom.  If  the  mothers  of  the  free  states 
had  all  felt  as  they  should  in  times  past,  the  sons 
of  the  free  states  would  not  have  been  the  holders, 
and  proverbially  the  hardest  masters,  of  slaves; 
the  sons  of  the  free  states  would  not  have  connived 
at  the  extension  of  slavery  in  our  national  body." 
"Your  book  is  going  to  be  the  great  pacificator," 
wrote  a  friend  of  Mrs.  Stowe;  "it  will  unite  North 
and  South."  But  the  distinctly  Christian  and 
fraternal  intention  of  the  book  was  swiftly  for 
gotten  in  the  storm  of  controversy  that  followed 
its  appearance.  It  had  been  written  hastily, 
fervidly,  in  the  intervals  of  domestic  toil  at  Bruns 
wick,  had  been  printed  as  a  serial  in  The  National 
Era  without  attracting  much  attention,  and  was 


222  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

issued  in  book  form  in  March,  1852.  Its  sudden 
and  amazing  success  was  not  confined  to  this 
country.  The  story  ran  in  three  Paris  newspapers 
at  once,  wras  promptly  dramatized,  and  has  held 
the  stage  in  France  ever  since.  It  was  placed  upon 
the  Index  in  Italy,  as  being  subversive  of  estab 
lished  authority.  Millions  of  copies  were  sold  in 
Europe,  and  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  more  than  any 
other  cause,  held  the  English  working  men  in 
sympathy  with  the  North  in  the  English  cotton 
crisis  of  our  Civil  War. 

It  is  easy  to  see  the  faults  of  this  masterpiece 
and  impossible  not  to  recognize  its  excellencies. 
"If  our  art  has  not  scope  enough  to  include  a  book 
of  this  kind,"  said  Madame  George  Sand,  "we 
had  better  stretch  the  terms  of  our  art  a  little." 
For  the  book  proved  to  be,  as  its  author  had  hoped, 
a  "living  dramatic  reality."  Topsy,  Chloe,  Sam 
and  Andy,  Miss  Ophelia  and  Legree  are  alive. 
Mrs.  St.  Clare  might  have  been  one  of  Balzac's 
indolent,  sensuous  women.  Uncle  Tom  himself  is 
a  bit  too  good  to  be  true,  and  readers  no  longer 
weep  over  the  death  of  little  Eva  —  nor,  for  that 
matter,  over  the  death  of  Dickens's  little  Nell. 
There  is  some  melodrama,  some  religiosity,  and 
there  are  some  absurd  recognition  scenes  at  the 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  223 

close.  Nevertheless  with  an  instinctive  genius 
which  Zola  would  have  envied,  Mrs.  Stowe  embod 
ies  in  men  and  women  the  vast  and  ominous  sys 
tem  of  slavery.  All  the  tragic  forces  of  necessity, 
blindness,  sacrifice,  and  retribution  are  here: 
neither  Shelby,  nor  Eliza,  nor  the  tall  Kentuckian 
who  aids  her,  nor  John  Bird,  nor  Uncle  Tom  him 
self  in  the  final  act  of  his  drama,  can  help  himself. 
For  good  or  evil  they  are  the  products  and  results 
of  the  system;  and  yet  they  have  and  they  give 
the  illusion  of  volition. 

Mrs.  Stowe  lived  to  write  many  another  novel 
and  short  story,  among  them  Dred,  The  Minister's 
Wooing,  Oldtown  Folks,  Oldtown  Fireside  Stories. 
In  the  local  short  story  she  deserves  the  honors  due 
to  one  of  the  pioneers,  and  her  keen  affectionate 
observation,  her  humor,  and  her  humanity,  would 
have  given  her  a  literary  reputation  quite  inde 
pendent  of  her  masterpiece.  But  she  is  likely  to 
pay  the  penalty  of  that  astounding  success,  and  to 
go  down  to  posterity  as  the  author  of  a  single  book. 
She  would  not  mind  this  fate. 

The  poetry  of  the  idea  of  Freedom  and  of  the 
sectional  struggle  which  was  necessary  before  that 
idea  could  be  realized  in  national  policy  is  on  the 
whole  not  commensurate  with  the  significance  of 


224   AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

the  issue  itself.  Any  collection  of  American  po 
litical  verse  produced  during  this  period  exhibits 
spirited  and  sincere  writing,  but  the  combination 
of  mature  literary  art  and  impressive  general  ideas 
is  comparatively  rare.  There  are  single  poems  of 
Whittier,  Lowell,  and  Whitman  which  meet  every 
test  of  effective  political  and  social  verse,  but  the 
main  body  of  poetry,  both  sectional  and  national, 
written  during  the  thirty  years  ending  with  1865 
lacks  breadth,  power,  imaginative  daring.  The 
continental  spaciousness  and  energy  which  foreign 
critics  thought  they  discovered  in  Whitman  is  not 
characteristic  of  our  poetry  as  a  whole.  Victor 
Hugo  and  Shelley  and  Swinburne  have  written  far 
more  magnificent  republican  poetry  than  ours.  The 
passion  for  freedom  has  been  very  real  upon  this  side 
of  the  Atlantic;  it  pulsed  in  the  local  loyalty  of  the 
men  who  sang  Dixie  as  well  as  in  their  antagonists 
who  chanted  John  Brown's  Body  and  The  Battle 
Hymn  of  tlie  Republic;  but  this  passion  has  not  yet 
lifted  and  ennobled  any  notable  mass  of  American 
verse.  Even  the  sentiment  of  union  was  more 
adequately  voiced  in  editorials  and  sermons  and 
orations,  even  in  a  short  story  —  Edward  Everett 
Hale's  Man  Without  a  Country  —  than  by  most  of 
the  poets  who  attempted  to  glorify  that  theme. 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  225 

Nevertheless  the  verse  of  these  thirty  years  is 
rich  in  provincial  and  sectional  loyalties.  It  has 
earnestness  and  pathos.  We  have,  indeed,  no 

•» 

adequate  national  anthem,  even  yet,  for  neither 
the  words  nor  the  music  of  The  Star-Spangled 
Banner  fully  express  what  we  feel  while  we  are 
trying  to  sing  it,  as  the  Marseillaise,  for  example, 
does  express  the  very  spirit  of  revolutionary  repub 
licanism.  But  in  true  pioneer  fashion  we  get  along 
with  a  makeshift  until  something  better  turns  up. 
The  lyric  and  narrative  verse  of  the  Civil  War  it 
self  was  great  in  quantity,  and  not  more  inferior 
in  quality  than  the  war  verse  of  other  nations  has 
often  proved  to  be  when  read  after  the  immediate 
occasion  for  it  has  passed.  Single  lyrics  by  Tim- 
rod  and  Paul  Hayne,  Boker,  H.  H.  Brownell,  Read, 
Stedman,  and  other  men  are  still  full  of  fire.  Yet 
Mrs.  Howe's  Battle  Hymn,  scribbled  hastily  in  the 
gray  dawn,  interpreted,  as  no  other  lyric  of  the 
war  quite  succeeded  in  interpreting,  the  mystical 
glory  of  sacrifice  for  Freedom.  Soldiers  sang  it  in 
camp;  women  read  it  with  tears;  children  repeated 
it  in  school,  vaguely  but  truly  perceiving  in  it,  as 
their  fathers  had  perceived  in  Webster's  Reply  to 
Hayne  thirty  years  before,  the  idea  of  union  made 
C£ simple,  sensuous,  passionate."  No  American 


226  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

poem  has  had  a  more  dramatic  and  intense  life 
in  the  quick  breathing  imagination  of  men. 

More  and  more,  however,  the  instinct  of  our 
people  is  turning  to  the  words  of  Abraham  Lin 
coln  as  the  truest  embodiment  in  language,  as  his 
life  was  the  truest  embodiment  in  action,  of  our 
national  ideal.  It  is  a  curious  reversal  of  contempv 
orary  judgments  that  thus  discovers  in  the  homely 
phrases  of  a  frontier  lawyer  the  most  perfect  liter 
ary  expression  of  the  deeper  spirit  of  his  time. 
"How  knoweth  this  man  letters,  having  never 
learned?"  asked  the  critical  East.  The  answer  is 
that  he  had  learned  in  a  better  school  than  the 
East  afforded.  The  story  of  Lincoln's  life  is  happi 
ly  too  familiar  to  need  retelling  here,  but  some  of 
the  elements  in  his  growth  in  the  mastery  of  speech 
may  at  least  be  summarized. 

Lincoln  had  a  slow,  tireless  mind,  capable  of 
intense  concentration.  It  was  characteristic  of 
him  that  he  rarely  took  notes  when  trying  a  law 
case,  saying  that  the  notes  distracted  his  atten 
tion.  When  his  partner  Herndon  was  asked  when 
Lincoln  had  found  time  to  study  out  the  constitu 
tional  history  of  the  United  States,  Herndon  ex 
pressed  the  opinion  that  it  was  when  Lincoln  was 
lying  on  his  back  on  the  office  sofa,  apparently 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  227 

watching  the  flies  upon  the  ceiling.  This  com 
bination  of  bodily  repose  with  intense  mental  and 
spiritual  activity  is  familiar  to  those  who  have 
studied  the  biography  of  some  of  the  great  mystics. 
Walter  Pater  pointed  it  out  in  the  case  of  Words 
worth. 

In  recalling  the  poverty  and  restriction  of 
Lincoln's  boyhood  and  his  infrequent  contact  with 
schoolhouses,  it  is  well  to  remember  that  he  man 
aged  nevertheless  to  read  every  book  within  twenty 
miles  of  him.  These  were  not  many,  it  is  true,  but 
they  included  The  Bible,  JZsop's  Fables,  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  Robinson  Crusoe,  and,  a  little  later,  Burns 
and  Shakespeare.  Better  food  than  this  for  the 
mind  of  a  boy  has  never  been  found.  Then  he 
came  to  the  history  of  his  own  country  since  the 
Declaration  of  Independence  and  mastered  it. 
"I  am  tolerably  well  acquainted  with  the  history 
of  the  country, "  he  remarked  in  his  Chicago  speech 
of  1858;  and  in  the  Cooper  Union  speech  of  1860 
he  exhibited  a  familiarity  with  the  theory  and  his 
tory  of  the  Constitution  which  amazed  the  young 
lawyers  who  prepared  an  annotated  edition  of  the 
address.  "  He  has  wit,  facts,  dates, "  said  Douglas, 
in  extenuation  of  his  own  disinclination  to  enter 
upon  the  famous  joint  debates,  and,  when  Douglas 


228  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

returned  to  Washington  after  the  debates  were 
over,  he  confessed  to  the  young  Henry  Watterson 
that  "he  is  the  greatest  debater  I  have  ever  met, 
either  here  or  anywhere  else. "  Douglas  had  won 
the  senatorship  and  could  afford  to  be  generous, 
but  he  knew  well  enough  that  his  opponent's 
facts  and  dates  had  been  unanswerable.  Lincoln's 
mental  grip,  indeed,  was  the  grip  of  a  born  wrestler. 
"I've  got  him,"  he  had  exclaimed  toward  the  end 
of  the  first  debate,  and  the  Protean  Little  Giant, 
as  Douglas  was  called,  had  turned  and  twisted  in 
vain,  caught  by  "that  long-armed  creature  from 
Illinois."  He  could  indeed  win  the  election  of 
1858,  but  he  had  been  forced  into  an  interpretation 
of  the  Dred  Scott  decision  which  cost  him  the 
Presidency  in  1860. 

Lincoln's  keen  interest  in  words  and  definitions, 
his  patience  in  searching  the  dictionary,  is  known  to 
every  student  of  his  life.  Part  of  his  singular  dis 
crimination  in  the  use  of  language  is  due  to  his 
legal  training,  but  his  style  was  never  profession 
alized.  Neither  did  it  have  anything  of  that  fron 
tier  glibness  and  banality  which  was  the  curse  of 
popular  oratory  in  the  West  and  South.  Words 
were  weapons  in  the  hands  of  this  self-taught 
fighter  for  ideas:  he  kept  their  edges  sharp,  and 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  229 

could  if  necessary  use  them  with  deadly  accuracy. 
He  framed  the  "Freeport  dilemma"  for  the  un 
wary  feet  of  Douglas  as  cunningly  as  a  fox-hunter 
lays  his  trap.  "Gentlemen,"  he  had  said  of  an 
earlier  effort,  "Judge  Douglas  informed  you  that 
this  speech  of  mine  was  probably  carefully  pre 
pared.  I  admit  that  it  was." 

The  story,  too,  was  a  weapon  of  attack  and  de 
fense  for  this  master  fabulist.  Sometimes  it  was  a 
readier  mode  of  argument  than  any  syllogism; 
sometimes  it  gave  him,  like  the  traditional  diplo 
matist's  pinch  of  snuff,  an  excuse  for  pausing  while 
he  studied  his  adversary  or  made  up  his  own  mind; 
sometimes,  with  the  instinct  of  a  poetic  soul,  he 
invented  a  parable  and  gravely  gave  it  a  historic 
setting  "over  in  Sangamon  County."  For  al 
though  upon  his  intellectual  side  the  man  was  a 
subtle  and  severe  logician,  on  his  emotional  side 
he  was  a  lover  of  the  concrete  and  human.  He  was 
always,  like  John  Bunyan,  dreaming  and  seeing 
"a  man"  who  symbolized  something  apposite 
to  the  occasion.  Thus  even  his  invented  stories 
aided  his  marvelous  capacity  for  statement,  for 
specific  illustration  of  a  general  law.  Lincoln's 
destiny  was  to  be  that  of  an  explainer,  at  first  to  a 
local  audience  in  store  or  tavern  or  courtroom. 


230  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

then  to  upturned  serious  faces  of  Illinois  farmers 
who  wished  to  hear  national  issues  made  clear  to 
them,  then  to  a  listening  nation  in  the  agony  of 
civil  war,  and  ultimately  to  a  world  which  looks 
to  Lincoln  as  an  exponent  and  interpreter  of  the 
essence  of  democracy. 

As  the  audience  increased,  the  style  took  on 
beauty  and  breadth,  as  if  the  man's  soul  were 
looking  through  wider  and  wider  windows  at  the 
world.  But  it  always  remained  the  simplest  of 
styles.  In  an  offhand  reply  to  a  serenade  by  an 
Indiana  regiment,  or  in  answering  a  visiting  depu 
tation  of  clergymen  at  the  White  House,  Lincoln 
could  summarize  and  clarify  a  complicated  na 
tional  situation  with  an  ease  and  orderliness  and 
fascination  that  are  the  despair  of  professional 
historians.  He  never  wasted  a  word.  "  Go  to  work 
is  the  only  cure  for  your  case,"  he  wrote  to  John 
D.  Johnston.  There  are  ten  words  in  that  sen 
tence  and  none  of  over  four  letters.  The  Gettys 
burg  Address  contains  but  two  hundred  and  seventy 
words,  in  ten  sentences.  "It  is  a  flat  failure, "  said 
Lincoln  despondently;  but  Edward  Everett,  who 
had  delivered  "the"  oration  of  that  day,  wrote  to 
the  President:  "I  should  be  glad  if  I  could  flatter 
myself  that  I  came  as  near  to  the  central  idea  of 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  231 

the  occasion  in  two  hours  as  you  did  in  two  min 
utes."  Today  the  Address  reads  as  if  Lincoln 
knew  that  it  would  ultimately  be  stamped  in 
bronze. 

Yet  the  real  test  of  Lincoln's  supremacy  in  our 
distinctly  civic  literature  lies  not  so  much  in  his 
skill  in  the  manipulation  of  language,  consummate 
as  that  wras,  but  rather  in  those  large  elements  of 
his  nature  which  enabled  him  to  perceive  the  true 
quality  and  ideal  of  American  citizenship  and  its 
significance  to  the  world.  There  was  melancholy 
in  that  nature,  else  there  had  been  a  less  rich  humor; 
there  was  mysticism  and  a  sense  of  religion 
which  steadily  deepened  as  his  responsibilities 
increased.  There  was  friendliness,  magnanimity, 
pity  for  the  sorrowful,  patience  for  the  slow  of 
brain  and  heart,  and  an  expectation  for  the 
future  of  humanity  which  may  best  be  described 
in  the  old  phrase  "waiting  for  the  Kingdom  of 
God."  His  recurrent  dream  of  the  ship  coming 
into  port  under  full  sail,  which  preluded  many 
important  events  in  his  own  life  —  he  had  it  the 
night  before  he  was  assassinated  —  is  significant 
not  only  of  that  triumph  of  a  free  nation  which  he 
helped  to  make  possible,  but  also  of  the  victory  of 
what  he  loved  to  call  "the  whole  family  of  man." 


232  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

"That  is  the  real  issue,"  he  had  declared  in  closing 
the  debates  with  Douglas;  "that  is  the  issue  that 
will  continue  in  this  country  when  these  poor 
tongues  of  Judge  Douglas  and  myself  shall  be 
silent.  It  is  the  eternal  struggle  between  these 
two  principles  —  right  and  wrong  —  throughout 
the  world.  They  are  the  two  principles  that  have 
stood  face  to  face  from  the  beginning  of  time;  and 
will  ever  continue  to  struggle.  The  one  is  the 
common  right  of  humanity,  and  the  other  the 
divine  right  of  kings." 

For  this  representative  Anglo-Saxon  man,  de 
veloped  under  purely  American  conditions,  matur 
ing  slowly,  keeping  close  to  facts,  dying,  like  the 
old  English  saint,  while  he  was  "still  learning," 
had  none  of  the  typical  hardness  and  selfishness 
of  the  Anglo-Saxon.  A  brooder  and  idealist,  he 
was  one  of  those  "prophetic  souls  of  the  wide  world 
dreaming  on  things  to  come,"  with  sympathies 
and  imagination  that  reached  out  beyond  the 
immediate  urgencies  of  his  race  and  nation  to 
comprehend  the  universal  task  and  discipline  of 
the  sons  of  men.  In  true  fraternity  and  democracy 
this  Westerner  was  not  only  far  in  advance  of  his 
own  day,  but  he  is  also  far  in  advance  of  ours  which 
raises  statues  to  his  memory.  Yet  he  was  used 


UNION  AND  LIBERTY  233 

to  loneliness  and  to  the  long  view,  and  even  across 
the  welter  of  the  World  War  of  the  twentieth  cen 
tury  Lincoln  wTould  be  tall  enough  to  see  that  ship 
coming  into  the  harbor  under  full  sail. 


CHAPTER  X 

A  NEW   NATION 

THE  changes  that  have  come  over  the  inner  spirit 
and  the  outward  expression  of  American  life 
since  Lincoln's  day  are  enough  to  startle  the  curi 
osity  of  the  dullest  observer.  Yet  they  have 
been  accomplished  within  the  lifetime  of  a  single 
man  of  letters.  The  author  of  one  of  the  many 
campaign  biographies  of  Lincoln  in  1860  was  Wil 
liam  Dean  Howells,  then  an  Ohio  journalist  of 
twenty-three.  In  1917,  at  the  age  of  eighty,  Mr. 
Howells  is  still  adding  to  his  long  row  of  charming 
and  memorable  books.  Every  phase  of  American 
writing  since  the  middle  of  the  last  century  has 
fallen  under  the  keen  and  kindly  scrutiny  of  this 
loyal  follower  of  the  art  of  literature.  As  producer, 
editor,  critic,  and  friend  of  the  foremost  writers  of 
his  epoch,  Mr.  Howells  has  known  the  books  of  our 
new  national  era  as  no  one  else  could  have  known 
them.  Some  future  historian  of  the  period  may 

234 


A  NEW  NATION  235 

piece  together,  from  no  other  sources  than  Mr. 
Howells's  writings,  an  unrivaled  picture  of  our 
book-making  during  more  than  sixty  years.  All 
that  the  present  historian  can  attempt  is  to  sketch 
with  bungling  fingers  a  few  men  and  a  few  ten 
dencies  which  seem  to  characterize  the  age. 
/^One  result  of  the  Civil  War  was  picturesquely 
set  forth  in  Emerson's  Journal.  The  War  had 
unrolled  a  map  of  the  Union,  he  said,  and  hung  it 
in  every  man's  house.  There  was  a  universal 
shifting  of  attention,  if  not  always  from  the  pro 
vince  or  section  to  the  image  of  the  nation  itself, 
at  least  a  shift  of  focus  from  one  section  to  another. 
The  clash  of  arms  had  meant  many  other  things 
besides  the  triumph  of  Union  and  the  freedom  of 
the  slaves.  It  had  brought  men  from  every  state 
into  rude  jostling  contact  with  one  another  and 
had  developed  a  new  social  and  human  curiosity. 
It  may  serve  as  another  illustration  of  Professor 
Shaler's  law  of  tension  and  release.  The  one 
overshadowing  issue  which  had  absorbed  so  much 
thought  and  imagination  and  energy  had  suddenly 
disappeared.  Other  shadows  were  to  gather,  of 
course.  Reconstruction  of  the  South  was  one  of 
them,  and  the  vast  economic  and  industrial  changes 
that  followed  the  opening  of  the  New  West  were  to 


236  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

bring  fresh  problems  almost  as  intricate  as  the 
question  of  slavery  had  been.  But  for  the  moment 
no  one  thought  of  these  things.  The  South  ac 
cepted  defeat  as  superbly  as  she  had  fought,  and 
began  to  plough  once  more.  The  jubilant  North 
went  back  to  work — to  build  transcontinental 
railroads,  to  organize  great  industries,  and  to 
create  new  states. 

The  significant  American  literature  of  the  first 
decade  after  the  close  of  the  War  is  not  in  the 
books  dealing  directly  with  themes  involved  in  the 
War  itself.  It  is  rather  the  literature  of  this  new 
release  of  energy,  the  new  curiosity  as  to  kitherto 
unknown  sections,  the  new  humor  and  romance. 
Fred  Lewis  Pattee,  the  author  of  an  admirable 
History  of  American  Literature  since  1870,  uses 
scarcely  too  strong  a  phrase  when  he  entitles  this 
period  "The  Second  Discovery  of  America";  and 
he  quotes  effectively  from  Mark  T\yain,  who  was 
himself  one  of  these  discoverers :  "  The  eight  years 
in  America  from  1860  to  1868  uprooted  institutions 
that  were  centuries  old,  changed  the  politics  of  a 
people,  transformed  the  social  life  of  half  the 
country,  and  wrought  so  profoundly  upon  the 
entire  national  character  that  the  influence  cannot 
be  measured  short  of  two  or  three  generations. " 


A  NEW  NATION  237 

Let  us  begin  with  the  West,  and  with  that  joy 
ous  stage-coach  journey  of  young  Samuel  L. 
Clemens  across  the  plains  to  Nevada  in  1861, 
which  he  describes  in  Roughing  It.  Who  was  this 
Argonaut  of  the  new  era,  and  what  makes  him 
representative  of  his  countrymen  in  the  epoch  of 
release?  Born  in  Missouri  in  1835,  the  son  of  an 
impractical  emigrant  from  Virginia,  the  youth  had 
lived  from  his  fourth  until  his  eighteenth  year  on 
the  banks  of  the  Mississippi.  He  had  learned  the 
printer's  trade,  had  wandered  east  and  back  again, 
had  served  for  four  years  as  a  river-pilot  on  the 
Mississippi,  and  had  tried  to  enter  the  Confederate 
army.  Then  came  the  six  crowded  years,  chiefly 
as  newspaper  reporter,  in  the  boom  times  of  Ne 
vada  and  California.  His  fame  began  with  the 
publication  in  New  York  in  1867  of  The  Celebrated 
Jumping  Frog  of  Calaveras  County.  A  newspaper 
now  sent  him  to  Europe  to  record  "what  he  sees 
with  his  own  eyes."  He  did  so  in  Innocents 
Abroad,  and  his  countrymen  shouted  with  laughter. 
This,  then,  was  "Europe"  after  all  —  another 
"fake"  until  this  shrewd  river-pilot  who  signed 
himself  "Mark  Twain"  took  its  soundings!  Then 
came  a  series  of  far  greater  books — Roughing  It, 
Life  on  the  Mississippi,  The  Gilded  Age  (in  colla- 


238  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

boration),  and  Tom  Sawyer  and  Huckleberry  Finn 
—  books  that  make  our  American  Odyssey ',  rich  in 
the  spirit  of  romance  and  revealing  the  magic  of 
the  great  river  as  no  other  pages  can  ever  do  again. 
Gradually  Mark  Twain  became  a  public  character; 
he  retrieved  on  the  lecture  platform  the  loss  of  a 
fortune  earned  by  his  books;  he  enjoyed  his  honor 
ary  D.  Litt.  from  Oxford  University.  Every  reader 
of  American  periodicals  came  to  recognize  the 
photographs  of  that  thick  shock  of  hair,  those 
heavy  eyebrows,  the  gallant  drooping  little  figure, 
the  striking  clothes,  the  inevitable  cigar:  all  these 
things  seemed  to  go  with  the  part  of  professional 
humorist,  to  be  like  the  caressing  drawl  of  Mark's 
voice.  The  force  of  advertisement  could  no  fur 
ther  go.  But  at  bottom  he  was  far  other  than  a 
mere  maker  of  boisterous  jokes  for  people  with 
frontier  preferences  in  humor.  He  was  a  passion 
ate,  chivalric  lover  of  things  fair  and  good,  al 
though  too  honest  to  pretend  to  see  beauty  and 
goodness  where  he  could  not  personally  detect 
them — and  an  equally  passionate  hater  of  evil. 
Read  The  Man  Who  Corrupted  Hadleyburg  and 
The  Mysterious  Stranger.  In  his  last  years,  torn 
by  private  sorrows,  he  turned  as  black  a  philo 
sophical  pessimist  as  we  have  bred.  He  died  at 


A  NEW  NATION  239 

his  new  country  seat  in  Connecticut  in  1910.  Mr. 
Paine  has  written  his  life  in  three  great  volumes, 
and  there  is  a  twenty-five  volume  edition  of  his 
Work* 

All  the  evidence  seems  to  be  in.  Yet  the  ver 
dict  of  the  public  seems  not  quite  made  up.  It 
is  clear  that  Mark  Twain  the  writer  of  romance  is 
gaining  upon  Mark  Twain  the  humorist.  The 
inexhaustible  American  appetite  for  frontier  types 
of  humor  seizes  upon  each  new  variety,  crunches 
it  with  huge  satisfaction,  and  then  tosses  it  away. 
John  Phoenix,  Josh  Billings,  Jack  Downing,  Bill 
Arp,  Petroleum  V.  Nasby,  Artemus  Ward,  Bill 
Nye  —  these  are  already  obsolescent  names.  If 
Clemens  lacked  something  of  Artemus  Ward's 
whimsical  delicacy  and  of  Josh  Billings's  tested 
human  wisdom,  he  surpassed  all  of  his  competitors 
in  a  certain  rude,  healthy  masculinity,  the  humor  of 
river  and  mining-camp  and  printing-office,  where 
men  speak  without  censorship.  His  country-men 
liked  exaggeration,  and  he  exaggerated;  they 
liked  irreverence,  and  he  had  turned  iconoclast 
in  Innocents  Abroad.  As  a  professional  humorist, 
he  has  paid  the  obligatory  tax  for  his  extrava 
gance,  over-emphasis,  and  undisciplined  taste,  but 
such  faults  are  swiftly  forgotten  when  one  turns 


240  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

to  Huckleberry  Finn  and  the  negro  Jim  and  Pudd'n- 
head  Wilson,  when  one  feels  Mark  Twain's  power 
in  sheer  description  and  episode,  his  magic  in 
evoking  landscape  and  atmosphere,  his  blazing 
scorn  at  injustice  and  cruelty,  his  contempt  for 
quacks. 

Bret  Harte,  another  discoverer  of  the  West,  wears 
less  well  than  Mark  Twain  as  a  personal  figure,  but 
has  a  sure  place  in  the  evolution  of  the  American 
short  story,  and  he  did  for  the  mining-camps  of 
California  what  Clemens  wrought  for  the  Missis 
sippi  River:  he  became  their  profane  poet.  Yet  he 
was  never  really  of  them.  He  was  the  clever  out 
sider,  with  a  prospector's  eye,  looking  for  literary 
material,  and  finding  a  whole  rich  mine  of  it — a 
bigger  and  richer,  in  fact,  than  he  was  really  quali 
fied  to  work.  But  he  located  a  golden  vein  of  it 
wiih  an  instinct  that  did  credit  to  his  dash  of 
Hebrew  blood.  Born  in  Albany,  a  teacher's  son, 
brought  up  on  books  and  in  many  cities,  Harte 
emigrated  to  California  in  1854  at  the  age  of  six 
teen.  He  became  in  turn  a  drug-clerk,  teacher, 
type-setter,  editor,  and  even  Secretary  of  the  Cali 
fornia  Mint  —  his  nearest  approach,  apparently,  to 
the  actual  work  of  the  mines.  In  1868,  while 
editor  of  The  Overland  Monthly,  he  wrote  the  short 


A  NEW  NATION  241 

story  which  was  destined  to  make  him  famous  in 
the  East  and  to  release  him  from  California  for 
ever.  It  was  The  Luck  of  Roaring  Camp.  He  had 
been  writing  romantic  sketches  in  prose  and  verse 
for  years;  he  had  steeped  himself  in  Dickens,  like 
everybody  else  in  the  eigh teen-sixties;  and  now  he 
saw  his  pay -gravel  shining  back  into  his  own  shin 
ing  eyes.  It  was  a  pocket,  perhaps,  rather  than  a 
lead,  but  Bret  Harte  worked  to  the  end  of  his 
career  this  material  furnished  by  the  camps,  this 
method  of  the  short  story.  He  never  returned  to 
California  after  his  joyous  exit  in  1871.  For  a 
few  years  he  tried  living  in  New  York,  but  from 
1878  until  his  death  in  1902  Bret  Harte  lived  in 
Europe,  still  turning  out  California  stories  for  an 
English  and  American  public  which  insisted  upon 
that  particular  pattern. 

That  the  pattern  was  arbitrary,  theatrical, 
sentimental,  somewhat  meretricious  in  design,  in 
a  word  insincere  like  its  inventor,  has  been  re 
peated  at  due  intervals  ever,  since  1868.  The 
charge  is  true;  yet  it  is  far  from  the  whole  truth 
concerning  Bret  Harte's  artistry.  In  mastery  of 
the  technique  of  the  short  story  he  is  fairly  com 
parable  with  Poe,  though  less  original,  for  it  was 
Poe  who  formulated,  when  Bret  Harte  was  a  child 


242  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

of  six,  the  well-known  theory  of  the  unity  of  effect 
of  the  brief  tale.  This  unity  Harte  secured 
through  a  simplification,  often  an  insulation,  of  his 
theme,  the  omission  of  quarreling  details,  an  at 
mosphere  none  the  less  novel  for  its  occasional 
theatricality,  and  characters  cunningly  modulated 
to  the  one  note  they  were  intended  to  strike. 
Tennessee's  Partner,  The  Outcast  of  Poker  Flat,  and 
all  the  rest  are  triumphs  of  selective  skill  —  as 
bright  nuggets  as  ever  glistened  in  the  pan  at  the 
end  of  a  hard  day's  labor.  That  they  do  not  ade 
quately  represent  the  actual  California  of  the 
fifties,  as  old  Californians  obstinately  insist,  is 
doubtless  true,  but  it  is  beside  the  point.  Here  is 
no  Tolstoi  painting  the  soul  of  his  race  in  a  few 
pages :  Harte  is  simply  a  disciple  of  Poe  and  Dick 
ens,  turning  the  Poe  construction  trick  gracefully, 
with  Dickensy  characters  and  consistently  ro 
mantic  action. 

The  West  has  been  rediscovered  many  a  time 
since  that  decade  which  witnessed  the  first  liter 
ary  bonanza  of  Mark  Twain  and  Bret  Harte. 
It  will  continue  to  be  discovered,  in  its  fresh 
sources  of  appeal  to  the  imagination,  as  long  as 
Plains  and  Rockies  and  Coast  endure,  as  long  as 
there  is  any  glow  upon  a  distant  horizon.  It  is 


A  NEW  NATION  243 

not  places  that  lose  romantic  interest:  the  imme 
morial  English  counties  and  the  Bay  of  Naples 
offer  themselves  freely  to  the  artist,  generation  after 
generation.  What  is  lost  is  the  glamour  of  youth, 
the  specific  atmosphere  of  a  given  historical  epoch. 
Colonel  W.  F.  Cody  ("Buffalo  Bill")  has  typified 
to  millions  of  American  boys  the  great  period  of 
the  Plains,  with  its  Indian  fighting,  its  slaughter  of 
buffaloes,  its  robbing  of  stage-coaches,  its  superb 
riders  etched  against  the  sky.  But  the  Wild 
West  was  retreating,  even  in  the  days  of  Daniel 
Boone  and  Davy  Crockett.  The  West  of  the  cow 
boys,  as  Theodore  Roosevelt  and  Owen  Wister 
knew  it  and  wrote  of  it  in  the  eighties  and  nineties, 
has  disappeared,  though  it  lives  on  in  fiction  and 
on  the  screen. 

Jack  London,  born  in  California  in  1876,  was 
forced  to  find  his  West  in  Alaska  —  and  in  alcohol. 
He  was  what  he  and  his  followers  liked  to  call  the 
virile  or  red-blooded  type,  responsive  to  the  "  Call 
of  the  Wild,"  "living  life  naked  and  tensely."  In 
his  talk  Jack  London  was  simple  and  boyish,  with 
plenty  of  humor  over  his  own  literary  and  social 
foibles.  His  books  are  very  uneven,  but  he  wrote 
many  a  hard-muscled,  clean-cut  page.  If  the  Bret 
Harte  theory  of  the  West  was  that  each  man  is  at 


244  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

bottom  a  sentimentalist,  Jack  London's  formula 
was  that  at  bottom  every  man  is  a  brute.  Each 
theory  gave  provender  enough  for  a  short-story 
writer  to  carry  on  his  back,  but  is  hardly  adequate, 
by  itself,  for  a  very  long  voyage  over  human  life. 

"  Joaquin"  (Cincinnatus  Heine)  Miller,  who  was 
born  in  1841  and  died  in  1913,  had  even  less  of  a 
formula  for  the  West  than  Jack  London.  He  was 
a  word-painter  of  its  landscapes,  a  rider  over  its 
surfaces.  Cradled  "in  a  covered  wagon  pointing 
West, "  mingling  with  wild  frontier  life  from  Alaska 
to  Nicaragua,  miner,  Indian  fighter,  hermit,  poseur 
in  London  and  Washington,  then  hermit  again  in 
California,  the  author  of  Songs  of  the  Sierras  at 
least  knew  his  material.  Byron,  whom  he  adored 
and  imitated,  could  have  invented  nothing  more 
romantic  than  Joaquin's  life;  but  though  Joaquin 
inherited  Scotch  intensity,  he  had  nothing  of  the 
close  mental  grip  of  the  true  Scot  and  nothing  of 
his  humor.  Vast  stretches  of  his  poetry  are  empty ; 
some  of  it  is  grandiose,  elemental,  and  yet  somehow 
artificial,  as  even  the  Grand  Canyon  itself  looks  at 
certain  times. 

John  Muir,  another  immigrant  Scot  who  reached 
California  in  1868,  had  far  more  stuff  in  him  than 
Joaquin  Miller.  He  had  studied  geology,  botany, 


A  NEW  NATION  245 

and  chemistry  at  the  new  University  of  Wisconsin, 
and  then  for  years  turned  explorer  of  forests, 
peaks,  and  glaciers,  not  writing,  at  first,  except  in 
his  Journal,  but  forever  absorbing  and  worshiping 
sublimity  and  beauty  with  no  thought  of  literary 
schemes.  Yet  his  e very-day  talk  about  his  favor 
ite  trees  and  glaciers  had  more  of  the  glow  of  poetry 
in  it  than  any  talk  I  have  ever  heard  from  men  of 
letters,  and  his  books  and  Journal  will  long  per 
petuate  this  thrilling  sense  of  personal  contact  with 
wild,  clean,  uplifted  things  —  blossoms  in  giant 
tree-tops  and  snow-eddies  blowing  round  the 
shoulders  of  Alaskan  peaks.  Here  is  a  West  as 
far  above  Jack  London's  and  Frank  Norris's  as 
the  snow-line  is  higher  than  the  jungle. 

The  rediscovery  of  the  South  was  not  so  much 
an  exploration  of  fresh  or  f (gotten  geographical 
territory,  as  it  was  a  new  per^ption  of  the  roman 
tic  human  material  offered  by  a  peculiar  civiliza 
tion.  Political  and  social  causes  had  long  kept 
the  South  in  isolation.  A  few  writers  like  Wirt, 
Kennedy,  Longstreet,  Simms,  had  described  vari 
ous  aspects  of  its  life  with  grace  or  vivacity,  but 
the  best  picture  of  colonial  Virginia  had  been  drawn, 
after  all,  by  Thackeray,  who  had  merely  read  about 
it  in  books.  Visitors  like  Fanny  Kemble  and 


246  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

Frederick  Law  Olmsted  sketched  the  South  of 
the  mid-nineteenth  century  more  vividly  than  did 
the  sons  of  the  soil.  There  was  no  real  literary 
public  in  the  South  for  a  native  writer  like  Simms. 
He  was  as  dependent  upon  New  York  and  the 
Northern  market  as  a  Virginian  tobacco-planter  of 
1740  had  been  upon  London.  But  within  a  dozen 
years  after  the  close  of  the  War  and  culminating 
in  the  eighteen-nineties,  there  came  a  rich  and 
varied  harvest  of  Southern  writing,  notably  in  the 
field  of  fiction.  The  public  for  these  stories,  it  is 
true,  was  still  largely  in  the  North  and  West,  and 
it  was  the  magazines  and  publishing-houses  of 
New  York  and  Boston  that  gave  the  Southern 
authors  their  chief  stimulus  and  support.  It  was 
one  of  the  happy  proofs  of  the  solidarity  of  the 
new  nation. 

The  romance  of  the  Spanish  and  French  civiliza 
tion  of  New  Orleans,  as  revealed  in  Mr.  Cable's 
fascinating  Old  Creole  Days,  was  recognized,  not 
as  something  merely  provincial  in  its  significance, 
but  as  contributing  to  the  infinitely  variegated 
pattern  of  our  national  life.  Irwin  Russell,  Joel 
Chandler  Harris,  and  Thomas  Nelson  Page  por 
trayed  in  verse  and  prose  the  humorous,  pathetic, 
unique  traits  of  the  Southern  negro,  a  type  hitherto 


A  NEW  NATION  247 

chiefly  sketched  in  caricature  or  by  strangers. 
Page,  HopTanson  Smith,  Grace  King,  and  a  score 
of  other  artists  began  to  draw  affectionate  pic 
tures  of  the  vanished  Southern  mansion  of  planta 
tion  days,  when  all  the  women  were  beautiful  and 
all  the  men  were  brave,  when  the  very  horses  were 
more  spirited  and  the  dogs  lazier  and  the  honey 
suckles  sweeter  and  the  moonlight  more  entrancing 
than  today.  Miss  Murfree  ("C.  E.  Craddock") 
charmed  city-dwellers  and  country-folk  alike  by 
her  novels  of  the  Tennessee  mountains.  James 
Lane  Allen  painted  lovingly  the  hemp-fields  and 
pastures  of  Kentucky.  American  magazines  of 
the  decade  from  1880  to  1890  show  the  complete 
triumph  of  dialect  and  local  color,  and  this  move 
ment,  so  full  of  interest  to  students  of  the  immense 
divergence  of  American  types,  owed  much  of  its 
vitality  to  the  talent  of  Southern  writers. 

But  the  impulse  spread  far  beyond  the  South. 
Early  in  the  seventies  Edward  Eggleston  wrote 
The  Hoosier  Schoolmaster  and  The  Circuit  Rider, 
faithful  and  moving  presentations  of  genuine  pio 
neer  types  which  were  destined  to  pass  with 
the  frontier  settlements.  Soon  James  Whitcomb 
Riley  was  to  sing  of  the  next  generation  of  Hoosiers, 
who  frequented  The  Old  Sivimmin9  Hole  and  re- 


248  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

joiced  When  the  Frost  is  on  the  Punkin.  It  was  the 
era  of  Denman  Thompson's  plays,  Joshua  Whit- 
comb  and  The  Old  Homestead.  Both  the  homely 
and  the  exotic  marched  under  this  banner  of  local 
color:  Hamlin  Garland  presented  Iowa  barnyards 
and  cornfields,  Helen  Hunt  Jackson  dreamed  the 
romance  of  the  Mission  Indian  in  Ramona,  and 
Lafcadio  Hearn,  Irish  and  Greek  by  blood,  resi 
dent  of  New  Orleans  and  not  yet  an  adopted  citizen 
of  Japan,  tantalized  American  readers  with  his 
Chinese  Ghosts  and  Chita.  A  fascinating  period  it 
seems,  as  one  looks  back  upon  it,  and  it  lasted 
until  about  the  end  of  the  century,  when  the  sud 
denly  discovered  commercial  value  of  the  historical 
novel  and  the  ensuing  competition  in  best  sellers 
misled  many  a  fine  artistic  talent  and  coarsened 
the  public  taste.  The  New  South  then  played  the 
literary  market  as  recklessly  as  the  New  West. 

Let  us  glance  back  to  "the  abandoned  farm  of 
literature,"  as  a  witty  New  Yorker  once  charac 
terized  New  England.  The  last  quarter  of  the 
nineteenth  century  witnessed  a  decline  in  the  direct 
influence  of  that  province  over  the  country  as  a 
whole.  Its  strength  sapped  by  the  emigration  of 
its  more  vigorous  sons,  its  typical  institutions  sag 
ging  under  the  weight  of  immense  immigrations 


A  NEW  NATION  249 

from  Europe,  its  political  importance  growing 
more  and  more  negligible,  that  ancient  promontory 
of  ideas  has  continued  to  lose  its  relative  literary 
significance.  In  one  field  of  literature  only  has 
New  England  maintained  its  rank  since  the  Civil 
War,  and  that  is  in  the  local  short  story.  Here 
women  have  distinguished  themselves  beyond  the 
proved  capacity  of  New  England  men.  Mrs. 
Stowe  and  Rose  Terry  Cooke,  women  of  demo 
cratic  humor,  were  the  pioneers;  then  came  Har 
riet  Prescott  Spofford  and  Elizabeth  Stuart  Phelps, 
women  with  nerves;  and  finally  the  three  artists 
who  have  WTitten,  out  of  the  material  offered  by  a 
decadent  New  England,  as  perfect  short  stories  as 
France  or  Russia  can  produce — Sarah  Orne  Jewett, 
Mary  W7ilkins  Freeman,  and  Alice  Brown.  These 
gifted  writers  portrayed,  with  varying  technique 
and  with  singular  differences  in  their  instinctive 
choice  of  material,  the  dominant  qualities  of  an 
isolated,  in-bred  race,  still  proud  in  its  decline; 
still  inquisitive  and  acquisitive,  versatile  yet  stub 
born,  with  thrift  passing  over  into  avarice,  and 
mental  power  degenerating  into  smartness;  cold 
and  hard  under  long  repression  of  emotion,  yet 
capable  of  passion  and  fanaticism;  at  worst,  a 
mere  trader,  a  crank,  a  grim  recluse;  at  best,  en- 


250  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

do  wed  with  an  austere  physical  and  moral  beauty. 
Miss  Jewett  preferred  to  touch  graciously  the 
sunnier  slopes  of  this  provincial  temperament, 
to  linger  in  its  ancient  dignities  and  serenities. 
Miss  Brown  has  shown  the  pathos  of  its  thwarted 
desires,  its  hunger  for  a  beauty  and  a  happiness 
denied.  Mary  Wilkins  Freeman  revealed  its 
fundamental  tragedies  of  will. 

Two  of  the  best  known  writers  of  New  England 
fiction  in  this  period  were  not  natives  of  the  soil, 
though  they  surpassed  most  native  New  England- 
ers  in  their  understanding  of  the  type.  They  were 
William  Dean  Howells  and  Henry  James.  Mr. 
Howells,  who,  in  his  own  words,  "can  reasonably 
suppose  that  it  is  because  of  the  mixture  of  Welsh, 
German,  and  Irish  in  me  that  I  feel  myself  so 
typically  American,"  came  to  "the  Holy  Land  at 
Boston"  as  a  "passionate  pilgrim  from  the  West." 
A  Boy's  Town,  My  Literary  Passions,  and  Years 
of  my  Youth  make  clear  the  image  of  the  young 
poet-journalist  who  returned  from  his  four  years 
in  Venice  and  became  assistant  editor  of  The  At 
lantic  Monthly  in  1866.  In  1871  he  succeeded 
Fields  in  the  editorship,  but  it  was  not  until  after 
his  resignation  in  1881  that  he  could  put  his  full 
strength  into  those  realistic  novels  of  contempor- 


A  NEW  NATION  251 

ary  New  England  which  established  his  fame  as  a 
writer.  A  Modern  Instance  and  The  Rise  of  Silas 
Lapham  are  perhaps  the  finest  stories  of  this 
group;  and  the  latter  novel  may  prove  to  be  Mr. 
Howells's  chief  "visiting-card  to  posterity. "  We 
cannot  here  follow  him  to  New  York  and  to  a  new 
phase  of  novel  writing,  begun  with  A  Hazard  of 
New  Fortunes,  nor  can  we  discuss  the  now  anti 
quated  debate  upon  realism  which  was  waged  in 
the  eighteen-eighties  over  the  books  of  Howells 
and  James.  We  must  content  ourselves  with 
saying  that  a  knowledge  of  Mr.  Howells's  work  is 
essential  to  the  student  of  the  American  provincial 
novel,  as  it  is  also  to  the  student  of  our  more 
generalized  types  of  story-writing,  and  that  he 
has  never  in  his  long  career  written  an  insincere,  a 
slovenly,  or  an  infelicitous  page.  My  Literary 
Friends  and  Acquaintance  gives  the  most  charming 
picture  ever  drawn  of  the  elder  Cambridge,  Con 
cord,  and  Boston  men  who  ruled  over  our  literature 
when  young  Howells  came  out  of  the  West,  and 
My  Marie  Twain  is  his  memorable  portrait  of  an 
other  type  of  sovereign,  perhaps  the  dynasty  that 
will  rule  the  future. 

Although  Henry  James,  like  Mr.  Howells,  wrote 
at  one  time  acute  studies  of  New  England  char- 


252  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

acter,  he  was  never,  in  his  relations  to  that  section, 
or,  for  that  matter,  to  any  locality  save  possibly 
London,  anything  more  than  a  "visiting  mind." 
His  grandfather  was  an  Irish  merchant  in  Albany. 
His  father,  Henry  James,  was  a  philosopher  and 
wit,  a  man  of  comfortable  fortune,  who  lived 
at  times  in  Newport,  Concord,  and  Boston,  but 
who  was  residing  in  New  York  when  his  son  Henry 
was  born  in  1843.  No  child  was  ever  made  the 
subject  of  a  more  complete  theory  of  deracination. 
Transplanted  from  city  to  city,  from  country  to 
country,  without  a  family  or  a  voting-place,  with 
out  college  or  church  or  creed  or  profession  or 
responsibility  of  any  kind  save  to  his  own  exigent 
ideals  of  truth  and  beauty,  Henry  James  came 
to  be  the  very  pattern  of  a  cosmopolitan.  Avoid 
ing  his  native  country  for  nearly  thirty  years  and 
then  returning  for  a  few  months  to  write  some 
intricate  pages  about  that  American  Scene  which 
he  understood  far  less  truly  than  the  average 
immigrant,  he  died  in  1916  in  London,  having  just 
renounced  his  American  citizenship  and  become  a 
British  subject  in  order  to  show  his  sympathy 
with  the  Empire,  then  at  war.  It  was  the  sole 
evidence  of  political  emotion  in  a  lifetime  of 
seventy -three  years. 


A  NEW  NATION  253 

American  writing  men  are  justly  proud,  never 
theless,  of  this  expatriated  craftsman.  The  Ameri 
can  is  inclined  to  admire  good  workmanship  of  any 
kind,  as  far  as  he  can  understand  the  mechanism 
of  it.  The  task  of  really  understanding  Henry 
James  has  been  left  chiefly  to  clever  women  and 
to  a  few  critics,  but  ever  since  A  Passionate  Pilgrim 
and  Roderick  Hudson  appeared  in  1875,  it  has 
been  recognized  that  here  was  a  master,  in  his 
own  fashion.  What  that  fashion  is  may  now 
be  known  by  anyone  who  will  take  the  pains  to 
read  the  author's  prefaces  to  the  New  York  edition 
of  his  revised  works.  Never,  not  even  in  the 
Paris  which  James  loved,  has  an  artist  put  his 
intentions  and  his  self-criticism  more  definitively 
upon  paper.  The  secret  of  Henry  James  is  told 
plainly  enough  here:  a  specially  equipped  intelli 
gence,  a  freedom  from  normal  responsibilities, 
a  consuming  desire  to  create  beautiful  things,  and, 
as  life  unfolded  its  complexities  and  nuances 
before  his  vision,  an  increasing  passion  to  seek 
the  beauty  which  lies  entangled  and  betrayed,  a 
beauty  often  adumbrated  rather  than  made  plastic, 
stories  that  must  be  hinted  at  rather  than  told, 
raptures  that  exist  for  the  initiated  only.  The 
much  discussed  early  and  middle  and  later  man- 


254  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

ners  of  James  are  only  various  campaigns  of  this 
one  questing  spirit,  changing  his  procedure  as  the 
elusive  object  of  his  search  hid  itself  by  this  or 
that  device  of  protective  coloration  or  swift  escape. 
It  is  as  if  a  collector  of  rare  butterflies  had  one 
method  of  capturing  them  in  Madagascar,  another 
for  the  Orinoco,  and  still  another  for  Japan — 
though  Henry  James  found  his  Japan  and  Orinoco 
and  Madagascar  all  in  London  town! 

No  one  who  ever  had  the  pleasure  of  hearing 
him  discourse  about  the  art  of  fiction  can  forget  the 
absolute  seriousness  of  his  professional  devotion; 
it  was  as  though  a  shy  celebrant  were  to  turn  and 
explain,  with  mystical  intensity  and  a  mystic's 
involution  and  reversal  of  all  the  values  of  vulgar 
speech,  the  ceremonial  of  some  strange,  high  altar. 
His  own  power  as  a  creative  artist  was  not  always 
commensurate  with  his  intellectual  endowment  or 
with  his  desire  after  beauty,  and  his  frank  con 
tempt  for  the  masses  of  men  made  it  difficult 
for  him  to  write  English.  He  preferred,  as  did 
Browning,  who  would  have  liked  to  reach  the 
masses,  a  dialect  of  his  own,  and  he  used  it  increas 
ingly  after  he  was  fifty.  It  was  a  dialect  capable 
of  infinite  gradations  of  tone,  endless  refinements 
of  expression.  In  his  threescore  books  there  are 


A  NEW  NATION  255 

delicious  poignant  moments  where  the  spirit  of  life 
itself  flutters  like  a  wild  creature,  half-caught,  half- 
escaping.  It  is  for  the  beauty  and  thrill  of  these 
moments  that  the  pages  of  Henry-  James  will 
continue  to  be  cherished  by  a  few  thousand  readers 
scattered  throughout  the  Republic  to  which  he 
was  ever  an  alien. 

No  poet  of  the  new  era  has  won  the  national 
recognition  enjoyed  by  the  veterans.  It  will  be 
recalled  that  Bryant  survived  until  1878,  Long 
fellow  and  Emerson  until  1882,  Lowell  until  1891, 
Whittier  and  Whitman  until  1892,  and  Holmes 
until  1894.  Compared  with  these  men  the  younger 
writers  of  verse  seemed  overmatched.  The  Na- 
tional  Ode  for  the  Centennial  celebration  in  1876 
was  intrusted  to  Bayard  Taylor,  a  hearty  person, 
author  of  capital  books  of  travel,  plentiful  verse, 
and  a  skilful  translation  of  Faust.  But  an  ade 
quate  National  Ode  was  not  in  him.  Sidney 
Lanier,  who  was  writing  in  that  year  his  Psalm  of 
the  West  and  was  soon  to  compose  The  Marshes  of 
Glynn,  had  far  more  of  the  divine  fire.  He  was  a 
bookish  Georgia  youth  who  had  served  with 
the  Confederate  army,  and  afterward,  with  broken 
health  and  in  dire  poverty,  gave  his  brief  life  to 
music  and  poetry.  He  had  rich  capacities  for 


256  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

both  arts,  but  suffered  in  both  from  the  lack  of 
discipline  and  from  an  impetuous,  restless  imagi 
nation  which  drove  him  on  to  over-ambitious 
designs.  Whatever  the  flaws  in  his  affluent  verse, 
it  has  grown  constantly  in  popular  favor,  and 
he  is,  after  Poe,  the  best  known  poet  of  the  South. 
The  late  Edmund  Clarence  Stedman,  whose 
American  Anthology  and  critical  articles  upon 
American  poets  did  so  much  to  enhance  the 
reputation  of  other  men,  was  himself  a  maker  of 
ringing  lyrics  and  spirited  narrative  verse.  His 
later  days  were  given  increasingly  to  criticism,  and 
his  Life  and  Letters  is  a  storehouse  of  material 
bearing  upon  the  growth  of  New  York  as  a  liter 
ary  market-place  during  half  a  century.  Richard 
Watson  Gilder  was  another  admirably  fine  figure, 
poet,  editor,  and  leader  of  public  opinion  in  many 
a  noble  cause.  His  Letters,  likewise,  give  an  inti 
mate  picture  of  literary  New  York  from  the  seven 
ties  to  the  present.  Through  his  editorship  of 
Scribner's  Monthly  and  The  Century  Magazine 
his  sound  influence  made  itself  felt  upon  writers 
in  every  section.  His  own  lyric  vein  had  an  opal 
ine  intensity  of  fire,  but  in  spite  of  its  glow  his 
verse  sometimes  refused  to  sing. 

The  most  perfect  poetic  craftsman  of  the  period 


A  NEW  NATION  257 

—  and,  many  think,  our  one  faultless  worker  in 
verse  —  was  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich.  His  first 
volume  of  juvenile  verse  had  appeared  in  1855, 
the  year  of  Whittier's  Barefoot  Boy  and  Whitman's 
Leaves  of  Grass.  By  1865  his  poems  were  printed 
in  the  then  well-known  Blue  and  Gold  edition,  by 
Ticknor  and  Fields.  In  1881  he  succeeded  How- 
ells  in  the  editorship  of  the  Atlantic.  Aldrich  had 
a  versatile  talent  that  turned  easily  to  adroit  prose 
tales,  but  his  heart  was  in  the  filing  of  his  verses. 
Nothing  so  daintily  perfect  as  his  lighter  pieces 
has  been  produced  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic, 
and  the  deeper  notes  and  occasional  darker  ques- 

% 

tionings  of  his  later  verse  are  embodied  in  lines  of 
impeccable  workmanship.  Aloof  from  the  social 
and  political  conflicts  of  his  day,  he  gave  himself 
to  the  fastidious  creation  of  beautiful  lines,  believ 
ing  that  the  beautiful  line  is  the  surest  road  to 
Arcady,  and  that  Herrick,  whom  he  idolized, 
had  shown  the  way. 

To  some  readers  of  these  pages  it  may  seem  like 
profanation  to  pass  over  poets  like  Sill,  George 
Woodberry,  Edith  Thomas,  Richard  Hovey,  Wil 
liam  Vaughn  Moody,  Madison  Cawein— to  men 
tion  but  half  a  dozen  distinguished  names  out  of  a 
larger  company  —  and  to  suggest  that  James  WTiit- 

17 


258  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

comb  Riley,  more  completely  than  any  American 
poet  since  Longfellow,  succeeded  in  expressing 
the  actual  poetic  feelings  of  the  men  and  women 
who  composed  his  immense  audience.  Riley,  like 
Aldrich,  went  to  school  to  Herrick,  Keats,  Tenny 
son,  and  Longfellow,  but  when  he  began  writing 
newspaper  verse  in  his  native  Indiana  he  was 
guided  by  two  impulses  which  gave  individuality 
to  his  work.  "I  was  always  trying  to  write  of  the 
kind  of  people  I  knew,  and  especially  to  write 
verse  that  I  could  read  just  as  if  it  were  spoken 
for  the  first  time."  The  first  impulse  kept  him 
close  to  the  wholesome  Hoosier  soil.  The  second 
is  an  anticipation  of  Robert  Frost's  theory  of 
speech  tones  as  the  basis  of  verse,  as  well  as  a 
revival  of  the  bardic  practice  of  reciting  one's  own 
poems.  For  Riley  had  much  of  the  actor  and 
platform-artist  in  him,  and  comprehended  that 
poetry  might  be  made  again  a  spoken  art,  directed 
to  the  ear  rather  than  to  the  eye.  His  vogue, 
which  at  his  death  in  1915  far  surpassed  that  of 
any  living  American  poet,  is  inexplicable  to  those 
persons  only  who  forget  the  sentimental  traditions 
of  our  American  literature  and  its  frank  appeal  to 
the  emotions  of  juvenility,  actual  and  recollected. 
Riley 's  best  "holt"  as  a  poet  wras  his  memory  of 


A  NEW  NATION  259 

his  own  boyhood  and  his  perception  that  the  child- 
mind  lingers  in  every  adult  reader.  Genius  has 
often  been  called  the  gift  of  prolonged  adolescence, 
and  in  this  sense,  surely,  there  was  genius  in  the 
warm  and  gentle  heart  of  this  fortunate  provincial 
who  held  that  "old  Indianapolis"  was  "high 
Heaven's  sole  and  only  under-study. "  No  one 
has  ever  had  the  audacity  to  say  that  of  New 
York. 

We  have  had  American  drama  for  one  hundred 
and  fifty  years,1  but  much  of  it,  like  our  popular 
fiction  and  poetry,  has  been  subliterary,  more 
interesting  to  the  student  of  social  life  and  national 
character  than  to  literary  criticism  in  the  narrow 
sense  of  that  term.  Few  of  our  best  known  liter 
ary  men  have  written  for  the  stage.  The  public 
has  preferred  melodrama  to  poetic  tragedy, 
although  perhaps  the  greatest  successes  have  been 
scored  by  plays  which  are  comedies  of  manners 
rather  than  melodrama,  and  character  studies  of 
various  American  types,  built  up  around  the 
known  capabilities  of  a  particular  actor.  The 
twentieth  century  has  witnessed  a  marked  activity 
in  play-writing,  in  the  technical  study  of  the  drama, 

1  Representative  American  Plays,  edited  by  Arthur  Hobson  Quinn, 
N.  Y.,  1917. 


260  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

and  in  experiment  with  dramatic  production, 
particularly  with  motion  pictures  and  the  out-of- 
doors  pageant.  At  no  time  since  The  Prince  of 
Parthia  was  first  acted  in  Philadelphia  in  1767  has 
such  a  large  percentage  of  Americans  been  artisti 
cally  and  commercially  interested  in  the  drama,  but 
as  to  the  literary  results  of  the  new  movement  it  is 
too  soon  to  speak. 

Nor  is  it  possible  to  forecast  the  effect  of  a 
still  more  striking  movement  of  contemporary 
taste,  the  revival  of  interest  in  poetry  and  the 
experimentation  with  new  poetical  forms.  Such 
revival  and  experiment  have  often,  in  the  past, 
been  the  preludes  of  great  epochs  of  poetical 
production.  Living  Americans  have  certainly 
never  seen  such  a  widespread  demand  for  con 
temporary  verse,  such  technical  curiosity  as  to 
the  possible  forms  of  poetry,  or  such  variety  of 
bold  innovation.  Imagism  itself  is  hardly  as 
novel  as  its  contemporary  advocates  appear  to 
maintain,  and  free  verse  goes  back  far  in  our 
English  speech  and  song.  But  the  new  genera 
tion  believes  that  it  has  made  a  discovery  in 
reverting  to  sensations  rather  than  thought,  to 
the  naive  reproduction  of  retinal  and  muscular 
impressions,  as  if  this  were  the  end  of  the  matter. 


A  NEW  NATION  261 

The  self-conscious,  self-defending  side  of  the  new 
poetic  impulse  may  soon  pass,  as  it  did  in  the  case 
of  Wordsworth  and  of  Victor  Hugo.  WThatever 
happens,  we  have  already  had  fresh  and  exquisite 
revelations  of  natural  beauty,  and,  in  volumes  like 
North  of  Boston  and  A  Spoon  River  Anthology, 
judgments  of  life  that  run  very  deep. 

American  fiction  seems  just  now,  on  the  contrary, 
to  be  marking  time  and  not  to  be  getting  notice 
ably  forward.  Few  names  unknown  ten  years 
ago  have  won  wide  recognition  in  the  domain  of 
the  novel.  The  short  story  has  made  little  tech 
nical  advance  since  the  first  successes  of  "O. 
Henry,"  though  the  talent  of  many  observers 
has  dealt  with  new  material  offered  by  the  racial 
characteristics  of  European  immigrants  and  by 
new  phases  of  commerce  and  industry.  The 
enormous  commercial  demand  of  the  five-cent 
weeklies  for  short  stories  of  a  few  easily  recog 
nized  patterns  has  resulted  too  often  in  a  sub 
stitution  of  stencil-plate  generalized  types  instead 
of  delicately  and  powerfully  imagined  individual 
characters.  Short  stories  have  been  assembled, 
like  Ford  cars,  with  amazing  mechanical  expert- 
ness,  but  with  little  artistic  advance  in  design. 
The  same  temporary  arrest  of  progress  has 


AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

been  noted  in  France  and  England,  however, 
where  different  causes  have  been  at  work.  No  one 
can  tell,  in  truth,  what  makes  some  plants  in  the 
literary  garden  wither  at  the  same  moment  that 
others  are  outgrowing  their  borders. 

There  is  one  plant  in  our  own  garden,  however, 
whose  flourishing  state  will  be  denied  by  nobody — 
namely,  that  kind  of  nature- writing  identified  with 
Thoreau  and  practised  by  Thomas  Wentworth 
Higginson,  Starr  King,  John  Burroughs,  John 
Muir,  Clarence  King,  Bradford  Torrey,  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  William  J.  Long,  Thompson-Seton, 
Stewart  Edward  White,  and  many  others.  Their 
books  represent,  Professor  Canby1  believes,  the 
adventures  of  the  American  subconsciousness, 
the  promptings  of  forgotten  memories,  a  racial 
tradition  of  contact  with  the  wilderness,  and 
hence  one  of  the  most  genuinely  American  traits 
of  our  literature. 

Other  forms  of  essay  writing,  surely,  have 
seemed  in  our  own  generation  less  distinctive  of 
our  peculiar  quality.  While  admirable  bio 
graphical  and  critical  studies  appear  from  time  to 
time,  and  here  and  there  a  whimsical  or  trenchant 
discursive  essay  like  those  of  Miss  Repplier  or  Dr. 

1  "  Back  to  Nature,"  by  H.  S.  Canby,  Yale  Review,  July,  1917. 


A  NEW  NATION  263 

Crothers,  no  one  would  claim  that  we  approach 
France  or  even  England  in  the  field  of  criticism, 
literary  history,  memoirs,  the  bookish  essay,  and 
biography.  We  may  have  race-memories  of  a 
pine-tree  which  help  us  to  write  vigorously  and 
poetically  about  it,  but  we  write  less  vitally  as 
soon  as  we  enter  the  library  door.  A  Frenchman 
does  not,  for  he  is  better  trained  to  perceive  the 
continuity  and  integrity  of  race-consciousness, 
in  the  whole  field  of  its  manifestation.  He  does 
not  feel,  as  many  Americans  do,  that  they  are 
turning  their  back  on  life  when  they  turn  to  books. 
Perhaps  the  truth  is  that  although  we  are  a 
reading  people  we  are  not  yet  a  book-loving  people. 
The  American  newspaper  and  magazine  have  been 
successful  in  making  their  readers  fancy  that 
newspaper  and  magazine  are  an  equivalent  for 
books.  Popular  orators  and  popular  preachers 
confirm  this  impression,  and  colleges  and  univer 
sities  have  often  emphasized  a  vocational  choice  of 
books  —  in  other  words,  books  that  are  not  books 
at  all,  but  treatises.  It  is  not,  of  course,  that 
American  journalism,  whether  of  the  daily  or 
monthly  sort,  has  consciously  set  itself  to  supplant 
the  habit  of  book-reading.  A  thousand  social  and 
economic  factors  enter  into  such  a  problem.  But 


£64  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

few  observers  will  question  the  assertion  that  the 
influence  of  the  American  magazine,  ever  since  its 
great  period  of  national  literary  service  in  the 
eighties  and  nineties,  has  been  more  marked  in 
the  field  of  conduct  and  of  artistic  taste  than  in 
the  stimulation  of  a  critical  literary  judgment.  An 
American  schoolhouse  of  today  owes  its  improve 
ment  in  appearance  over  the  schoolhouse  of  fifty 
years  ago  largely  to  the  popular  diffusion,  through 
the  illustrated  magazines,  of  better  standards  of 
artistic  taste.  But  whether  the  judgment  of 
school-teachers  and  school-children  upon  a  piece 
of  literature  is  any  better  than  it  was  in  the  red 
schoolhouse  of  fifty  years  ago  is  a  disputable 
question. 

But  we  must  stop  guessing,  or  we  shall  never 
have  done.  The  fundamental  problem  of  our 
literature,  as  this  book  has  attempted  to  trace  it, 
has  been  to  obtain  from  a  mixed  population  dwell 
ing  in  sections  as  widely  separated  as  the  peoples 
of  Northern  and  Southern  Europe,  an  integral 
intellectual  and  spiritual  activity  which  could 
express,  in  obedience  to  the  laws  of  beauty  and 
truth,  the  emotions  stimulated  by  our  national  life. 
It  has  been  assumed  in  the  preceding  chapters  that 


A  NEW  NATION  265 

American  literature  is  something  different  from 
English  literature  written  in  America.  Canadian 
and  Australian  literatures  have  indigenous  quali 
ties  of  their  own,  but  typically  they  belong  to  the 
colonial  literature  of  Great  Britain.  This  can 
scarcely  be  said  of  the  writings  of  Franklin  and 
Jefferson,  and  it  certainly  cannot  be  said  of  the 
writings  of  Cooper,  Hawthorne,  Emerson,  Thor- 
eau,  Whitman,  Lowell,  Lincoln,  Mark  Twain,  and 
Mr.  Howells.  In  the  pages  of  these  men  and  of 
hundreds  of  others  less  distinguished,  there  is 
a  revelation  of  a  new  national  type.  That  the  full 
energies  of  this  nation  have  been  back  of  our 
books,  giving  them  a  range  and  vitality  and  unity 
commensurate  with  the  national  existence,  no 
one  would  claim.  There  are  other  spheres  of 
effort  in  which  American  character  has  been  more 
adequately  expressed  than  in  words.  Neverthe 
less  the  books  are  here,  in  spite  of  every  defect  in 
national  discipline,  every  flaw  in  national  char 
acter;  and  they  deserve  the  closest  attention  from 
all  those  who  are  trying  to  understand  the  Ameri 
can  mind. 

If  the  effort  toward  an  expression  of  a  peculiarly 
complex  national  experience  has  been  the  prob 
lem  of  our  literary  past,  the  literary  problem 


266  AMERICAN  SPIRIT  IN  LITERATURE 

of  the  future  is  the  expression  of  the  adjustment 
of  American  ideals  to  the  standards  of  civilization. 
"Patriotism,"  said  the  martyred  Edith  Cavell 
just  before  her  death,  "is  not  enough."  Nation 
ality  and  the  instincts  of  national  separatism  now 
seem  essential  to  the  preservation  of  the  political 
units  of  the  world-state,  precisely  as  a  healthy 
individualism  must  be  the  basis  of  all  enduring  so 
cial  fellowship.  Yet  it  is  clear  that  civilization 
is  a  larger,  more  ultimate  term  than  nationality. 
Chauvinism  is  nowhere  more  repellent  than  in  the 
things  of  the  mind.  It  is  difficult  for  some  Ameri 
cans  to  think  internationally  even  in  political  af 
fairs —  to  construe  our  national  policy  and  duty  in 
terms  of  obligation  to  civilization.  Nevertheless  the 
task  must  be  faced,  and  we  are  slowly  realizing  it. 
In  the  field  of  literature,  likewise,  Americanism 
is  not  a  final  word  either  of  blame  or  praise.  It  is 
a  word  of  useful  characterization.  Only  Ameri 
can  books,  and  not  books  written  in  English  in 
America,  can  adequately  represent  our  national 
contribution  to  the  world's  thinking  and  feeling. 
So  argued  Emerson  and  Whitman,  long  ago.  But 
the  younger  of  these  two  poets  came  to  realize 
in  his  old  age  that  the  New  World  and  the  Old 
World  are  fundamentally  one.  The  literature  of 


A  NEW  NATION  267 

the  New  World  will  inevitably  have  an  accent  of 
its  own,  but  it  must  speak  the  mother-language  of 
civilization,  share  in  its  culture,  accept  its  discipline. 
It  has  been  said  disparagingly  of  Longfellow 
and  his  friends:  "The  houses  of  the  Brahmins  had 
only  eastern  windows.  The  souls  of  the  whole 
school  lived  in  the  old  lands  of  culture,  and  they 
visited  these  lands  as  often  as  they  could,  and, 
returning,  brought  back  whole  libraries  of  books 
which  they  eagerly  translated."  But  even  if 
Longfellow  and  his  friends  had  been  nothing  more 
than  translators  and  diffusers  of  European  culture, 
their  task  would  have  been  justified.  They  kept 
the  ideals  of  civilization  from  perishing  in  this  new 
soil.  Through  those  eastern  windows  came  in,  and 
still  comes  in,  the  sunlight  to  illumine  the  Ameri 
can  spirit.  To  decry  the  literatures  of  the  Ori 
ent  and  of  Greece  and  Rome  as  something  now 
outgrown  by  America,  is  simply  to  close  the 
eastern  windows,  to  narrow  our  conception  of  civili 
zation  to  merely  national  and  contemporaneous 
terms.  It  is  as  provincial  to  attempt  this  restric 
tion  in  literature  as  it  would  be  in  world-politics. 
We  must  have  all  the  windows  open  in  our  Ameri 
can  writing,  free  access  to  ideas,  knowledge  of 
universal  standards,  perception  of  universal  law. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

AN  authoritative  account  of  American  Literature  to 
the  close  of  the  Revolution  is  given  in  M.  C.  Tyler's 
History  of  American  Literature  during  the  Colonial 
Time,  %  volumes  '(1878)  and  Literary  History  of  the 
American  Revolution,  2  volumes  (1897).  For  a  general 
survey  see  Barrett  Wendell,  A  Literary  History  of 
America  (1900),  W.  P.  Trent,  American  Literature 
(1903),  G.  E.  Woodberry,  America  in  Literature 
(1903),  W.  C.  Bronson,  A  Short  History  of  American 
Literature  (1903),  with  an  excellent  bibliography,  W.  B. 
Cairns,  History  of  American  Literature  (1912),  W.  P. 
Trent  and  J.  Erskine,  Great  American  Writers  (1912), 
and  W.  Riley,  American  Thought  (1915).  The  most 
recent  and  authoritative  account  is  to  be  found  in  The 
Cambridge  History  of  American  Literature,  3  volumes 
edited  by  Trent,  Erskine,  Sherman,  and  Van  Doren. 

The  best  collection  of  American  prose  and  verse 
is  E.  C.  Stedman  and  E.  M.  Hutchinson's  Li 
brary  of  American  Literature,  11  volumes  (1888- 
1890).  For  verse  alone,  see  E.  C.  Stedman,  An 
American  Anthology  (1900),  and  W.  C.  Bronson, 
American  Poems,  1625-1892  (1912).  For  criticism 
of  leading  authors,  note  W.  C.  Brownell,  American 
Prose  Masters  (1909),  and  Stedman,  Poets  of  America 
(1885). 

269 


270  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Chapters  1-3.  Note  W.  Bradford,  Journal  (1898), 
J.  Winthrop,  Journal  (1825,  1826),  also  Life  and 
Letters  by  R.  C.  Winthrop,  2  volumes  (1863),  G.  L. 
Walker,  Thomas  Hooker  (1891),  O.  S.  Straus,  Roger 
Williams  (1894),  Cotton  Mather,  Diary,  2  volumes 
(1911,  1912),  also  his  Life  by  Barrett  Wendell  (1891), 
Samuel  Sewall,  Diary,  3  volumes  (1878).  For  Jona 
than  Edwards,  see  Works,  4  volumes  (1852),  his  Life 
by  A.  V.  G.  Allen  (1889),  Selected  Sermons  edited  by 
H.  N.  Gardiner  (1904).  The  most  recent  edition  of 
Franklin's  Works  is  edited  by  A.  H.  Smyth,  10  volumes 
(1907). 

Chapter  4-  Samuel  Adams,  Works,  4  volumes  (1904), 
John  Adams,  Works,  10  volumes  (1856),  Thomas  Paine, 
Life  by  M.  D.  Conway,  2  volumes  (1892),  Works 
edited  by  Conway,  4  volumes  (1895),  Philip  Freneau, 
Poems,  3  volumes  (Princeton  edition,  1902),  Thomas 
Jefferson,  Works  edited  by  P.  L.  Ford,  10  volumes 
(1892-1898),  J.  Woolman,  Journal  (edited  by  Whittier, 
1871,  and  also  in  Everyman's  Library),  The  Federalist 
(edited  by  H.  C.  Lodge,  1888). 

Chapter  5.  Washington  Irving,  Works,  40  volumes 
(1891-1897),  also  his  Life  and  Letters  by  P.  M.  Irving,  4 
volumes  (1862-1864).  Fenimore  Cooper,  Works,  32 
volumes  (1896),  Life  by  T.  R.  Lounsbury  (1883). 
Brockden  Brown,  Works,  6  volumes,  (1887).  WT.  C. 
Bryant,  Poems,  2  volumes  (1883),  Prose,  2  volumes 
(1884),  and  his  Life  by  John  Bigelow  (1890). 

Chapter  6.  H.  C.  Goddard,  Studies  in  New  England 
Transcendentalism  (1908).  R.  W.  Emerson,  Works,  12 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE  271 

volumes  (Centenary  edition,  1903),  Journal,  10  vol 
umes  (1909-1914),  his  Life  by  J.  E.  Cabot,  2  volumes 
(1887),  by  R.  Garnett  (1887),  by  G.  E.  Woodberry 
(1905);  see  also  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  a  critical 
study  by  O.  W.  Firkins  (1915) .  H.  D.  Thoreau,  Works, 
20  volumes  (Walden  edition  including  Journals,  1906), 
Life  by  F.  B.  Sanborn  (1917),  also  Thoreau,  A  Critical 
Study  by  Mark  van  Doren  (1916).  Note  also  Lindsay 
Swift,  Brook  Farm  (1900),  and  The  Dial,  reprint  by  the 
Rowfant  Club  (1902). 

Chapter  7.  Hawthorne,  Works,  12  volumes  (1882), 
Life  by  G.  E.  Woodberry  (1902).  Longfellow, 
Works,  11  volumes  (1886),  Life  by  Samuel  Longfellow, 
3  volumes  (1891).  Whittier,  Works,  7  volumes  (1892), 
Life  by  S.  T.  Pickard,  2  volumes  (1894).  Holmes, 
Works,  13  volumes  (1892),  Life  by  J.  T.  Morse,  Jr. 
(1896).  Lowell,  Works,  11  volumes  (1890),  Life  by 
Ferris  Greenslet  (1905),  Letters  edited  by  C.  E.  Norton, 
2  volumes  (1893).  For  the  historians,  note  H.  B. 
Adams,  Life  and  Writings  of  Jared  Sparks,  2  volumes 
(1893).  M.  A.  DeW.  Howe,  Life  and  Letters  of  George 
Bancroft,  2  volumes  (1908),  G.  S.  Hillard,  Life,  Letters, 
and  Journals  of  George  Ticknor,  2  volumes  (1876), 
George  Ticknor,  Life  of  Prescott  (1863),  also  Rollo 
Ogden,  Life  of  Prescott  (1904),  G.  W.  Curtis,  Corre 
spondence  of  J.  L.  Motley,  2  volumes  (1889),  Francis 
Parkman,  Works,  12  volumes  (1865-1898),  Life  by  C. 
H.  Farnham  (1900),  J.  F.  Jameson,  History  of  Histori 
cal  Writing  in  America  (1891). 

Chapter  8.  Poe,  Works,  10  volumes  (Stedman- Wood- 
berry  edition,  1894-1895),  also  17  volumes  (Virginia 


272  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

edition,  J.  A.  Harrison,  1902),  Life  by  G.  E.  Wood- 
berry,  2  volumes  (1909).  Whitman,  Leaves  of  Grass 
and  Complete  Prose  Works  (Small,  Maynard  and  Co.) 
(1897,  1898),  also  John  Burroughs,  A  Study  of  Whit 
man  (1896). 

Chapter  9.  C.  Schurz,  Life  of  Henry  Clay,  2  volumes 
(1887).  Daniel  Webster,  Works,  6  volumes  (1851), 
Life  by  H.  C.  Lodge  (1883).  Rufus  Choate,  Works,  2 
volumes  (1862).  Wendell  Phillips,  Speeches,  Lectures, 
and  Letters,  2  volumes  (1892).  W.  L.  Garrison,  The 
Story  of  his  Life  Told  by  his  Children,  4  volumes  (1885- 
1889).  Harriet  Beecher  Stowe,  Works,  17  volumes 
(1897),  Life  by  C.  E.  Stowe  (1889) .  Abraham  Lincoln, 
Works,  2  volumes  (edited  by  Nicolay  and  Hay,  1894). 

Chapter  10.  For  an  excellent  bibliography  of  the 
New  National  Period,  see  F.  L.  Pattee,  A  History  of 
American  Literature  since  1870  (1916). 

For  further  bibliographical  information  the  reader 
is  referred  to  the  articles  on  American  authors  in  TJie 
Encyclopaedia  Britannica  and  in  The  Warner  Library 
(volume  30,  The  Student's  Course,  N.  Y.,  1917). 


INDEX 


Adams,  C.  R,  7 

Adams,  John,  opinion  of  Amer 
ican  independence,  11-12;  as  a 
writer,  73 

Adams,  Samuel,  73-74,  209 

After  the  Burial,  Lowell,  172 

Agassiz,  Fiftieth  Birthday  of, 
Longfellow,  156 

Age  of  Reason,  Paine,  75 

Ages,  The,  Bryant,  104 

Alcott,  Bronson,  118,  119,  139- 
140 

Aldrich,  T.  B.,  256-57 

Alhambra,  The,  Irving,  91 

Allen,  J.  L.,  247 

American  Anthology,  Stedman, 
256 

American  characteristics,  3-5 

American  colonies,  literature  in 
the  17th  century,  25^42; 
journalism,  60-62;  education, 
62-63;  science,  63-64;  bibli 
ography  of  the  literature,  269- 
270 

American  colonists,  predomi 
nantly  English,  12-25;  motives 
for  emigration,  16;  moulded 
by  pioneer  life,  17-23;  in 
1760,  59-60 

"American  idea,"  206-07 

American  life  since  the  Civil 
War,  234  et  seq. 

American  literature,  the  term,  6 

American  Mercury,  61 

American  Scholar,  The,  Emerson, 
123 

Ames,  Fisher,  88 


Among  my  Books,  Lowell,  170 
Andrew  Rykmans  Prayer,  Whit- 
tier,  161 

Annabel  Lee,  Poe,  192 
Anthologies,  American,  269 
Arsenal  at  Springfield,  The,  Long 
fellow,  156 

Assignation,  The,  Poe,  193 
Astoria,  Irving,  91 
AtaJa,  Chateaubriand,  96 
Atlantic  Monthly,  161,  167,  170, 

250,  257 

Autobiography,  Franklin,  58-59 
Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast  Table, 
The,  Holmes,  164,  167 

Bacchus,  Emerson,  129 

Ballad  of  the  French  Fleet,  A, 
Longfellow,  155 

Bancroft,  George,  89, 176, 177-78 

Barefoot  Boy,  The,  Whittier,  158 

Bartol,  C.  A.,  115 

Battle  Hymn  of  the  Republic, 
Howe,  224,  225 

Battle  of  the  Kegs,  The,  Hopkin- 
son,  69 

Bay  Psalm  Book,  35 

Beecher,  H.  W.,  216-17 

Belfry  of  Bruges,  The,  Long 
fellow,  156 

Bells,  The,  Poe,  5-6,  192 

Biglow  Papers,  The,  Lowell,  170. 
172,  173 

Black  Cat,  The,  Poe,  194 

Blaine,  J.  G.,  quoted,  163 

Blithedale  Romance,  The,  Haw 
thorne,  145-46,  150-51 


273 


274 


INDEX 


Boston  News-Letter,  60 

Boy' »  Town,  A,  Howells,  250 

Bracebridge  Hall,  Irving,  91 

Bradford,  William,  28 

Bradstreet,  Anne,  36-37 

Bridge,  The,  Longfellow,  156 

Briggs,  C.  R,  quoted,  190 

Brook  Farm,  140,  143 

Brooklyn  Eagle,  The,  199 

Brown,  Alice,  249,  250 

Brown  University,  62 

Brownell,  H.H.,225 

Brownson,  Orestes,  141 

Bryant,  W.  C.,  one  of  the  Knick 
erbocker  Group,  89;  personal 
appearance,  101;  life  and, 
writings,  101-06;  died  (1878), 
255 

"Buffalo  Bill,"  see  Cody,  W.  F. 

Building  of  the  Ship,  The,  Long 
fellow,  155 

Burroughs,  John,  262 

By  Blue  Ontario  s  Shore,  Whit 
man,  204 

Byrd,  William,  44 

Ca'Je,  G.  W.,  246 

Calef,  Robert,  43 

Calhoun,  J.  C.,  215 

Calvinism  in  New  England,  18- 

19 
Cambridge     Thirty     Years    Ago, 

Lowell,  174 

Captain  Bonneville,  Irving,  91 
Carlyle,  Thomas,  quoted,  139 
Cask  of  Amontillado,  The,  Poe, 

193 

Cavell,  Edith,  quoted,  266 
Cawein,  Madison,  257 
Celebrated  Jumping  Frog  of  Gala- 

veras    County,   The,    Clemens, 

237 

Century  Magazine,  256 
Changeling,  The,  Lowell,  172 
Channing,  Edward,  13 
Channing,  W.  E.,  112,  113,  119, 

142 
Chateaubriand,  Vicomte  de,  96- 

97 


Children  s   Hour,    The,   Longfel 
low,  157 

Chita,  Hearn,  248 
Chinese  Ghosts,  Hearn,  248 
Choate,  Rufus,  215 
Church,  Captain,  39 
Circuit    Rider,    The,    Eggleston. 

247 

City  in  the  Sea,  The,  Poe,  189 
Clark,  Roger,  41 
Clarke,  J.  F.,  141 
Clay,  Henry,  208,  209-11 
Clemens,  S.  L.    (Mark   Twain), 

attacks    Cooper's    novels,  99; 

quoted,  236;  life  and  writings, 

237-40;    typically    American, 

265 
Cobbler  Keezar's  Vision,  Whittier, 

161 

Cody,  W.  F.  (Buffalo  Bill),  243 
Columbus,  Life  of,  Irving,  91 
Commemoration  Ode,  Lowell,  170, 

172 

Common  Sense,  Paine,  75 
Conquest  of  Granada,  Irving,  91 
Conquest  of  Mexico,  Prescott,  179 
Conquest  of  Peru,  Prescott,  179 
Conspiracy      of     Pontiac,     The, 

Parkman,  184 
Cooke,  Rose  Terry,  249 
Cooper,  J.  F.,  95-101,  265 
Cotton,  John,  18,  32 
Courtship     of    Miles     Standish, 

Longfellow,  155 
"Craddock,  C.  E.,"  see  Murfrec, 

Mary  N. 

Cranch,  C.  P.,  141 
Crisis,  The,  Paine,  75 
Cristus,  Longfellow,  155-56 
Cromwell,  Oliver,  10 
Crothers,  S.  M.,  262-63 
Crowded  Street,  The,  Bryant,  106 
Curtis,  G.  W.,  93,  141,  181 

Dana,  C.  A.,  141 

Day  is  Done,  The,  Longfellow,  156 

Day  of  Doom,  The,  Wigglesworth, 

35-36 
Deerslayer,  The,  Cooper,  99 


INDEX 


275 


Democratic  Review,  199 

Dial,  136,  140 

Drake,  J.  R.,  107 

Drama,   American,  in  the  20th 

century,  259-60 
Dred,  Stowe,  223 
Drum  Taps,  Whitman,  201 
Dwight,  Timothy,  69 

Edict    of   the    King    of   Prussia 

against  England,  Franklin,  58 
Edinburgh  Review,  The,  88 
Edwards,  Jonathan,  32,    45,  48- 

52 

Eggleston,  Edward,  247 
Eliot,  John,  19,  38 
Elsie  Venner,  Holmes,  168 
Embargo,  The,  Bryant,  102  If 
Emerson,   R.   W.,   in   1826,   89; 
a    Transcendentalist,    113-17; 
quoted,  116-17;  life  and  writ 
ings,  119-30;  died  (1882),  255; 
typically   American,    265;   ar 
gues  for  American  books,  266 
England  in  the  17th  century,  13 
English  Traits,  Emerson,  128 
Essay  on  Man,  Pope,  55 
Essays,   Emerson.    125-26,    127, 

128 
Essays  of  the  20th  century,  262- 

63 
Eternal  Goodness,  The,  Whittier, 

161 

Ethan  Brand,  Hawthorne,  134 
Evangelinc,  Longfellow,  155 
Evening  Revery,  An,  Bryant,  100 
Everett,     Edward,     Oration    at 
Cambridge  (1826),  86;  quoted, 
87;  lectures,  111-12;  estimate 
of,  215;  quoted,  230 
Excelsior,  Longfellow,  5-6,  156 
Exiles'  Departure,  Whittier,  159 

Fable  for  Critics,  Lowell,  170 
Fall  of  the  House  of  Usher,  The, 

Poe,  193 
Farewell    Address,    Washington, 

66 
Farewell  Sermon,  Edwards,  51 


Farmer  Refuted,  The,  Hamilton, 
76 

Faust  (translation),  Taylor,  255 

Federalist,  65,  76,  77 

Ferdinand  and  Isabella,  History 
of  the  Reign  of,  Prescott,  179 

Fiction  of  the  20th  century,  261- 
262 

Fire  of  Driftwood,  The,  Longfel 
low,  156 

First  Snowfall,  The,  Lowell,  172 

Flood  of  Years,  The,  Bryant,  106 

Forest  Hymn,  A,  Bryant,  106 

Franklin,  Benjamin,  born  (1706), 
44;  attitude  toward  church,  44; 
exponent  of  New  England  life, 
45;  life  and  writings,  52-59; 
conducts  Courant,  61;  activity 
in  Philadelphia,  (51-62;  letter 
from  Washington  to,  78-79; 
typically  American,  265 

Freeman,  Mary  Wilkins,  249. 
250 

Freneau,  Philip,  69,  70-72 

Frontenac,  Parkman,  185 

Frost,  Robert,  258 

Fugitive  slave  act,  144 

Fuller,  Margaret,  119,  140-41 

Garrison,  W.  L.,  89-90,  137,  159. 
208,  217-18 

Gettysburg  Address,  Lincoln,  230- 
231 

Gilded  Age,  The,  Clemens,  237- 
238 

God  Glorified  in  Mans  Depend 
ence,  Edwards,  50 

Gold  Bug,  The,  Poe,  193 

Gookin,  Daniel,  38 

Greeley,  Horace,  217-18 

Greenslet,  Ferris,  169 

Hale,  E.  E.,  224 

Half-Century  of  Conflict,  A,  Park 
man,  185 

Halleck,  Fitz-Greene,  107 
Hamilton,  Alexander,  76-77 
Hanging  of  the  Crane,  The,  Long 
fellow,  156 


276 


INDEX 


Harris,  J.  C.,  246 

Harte,  Bret,  240-42 

Harvard,  John,  16 

Harvard  College,  62 

Haunted  Palace,  The,  Poe,  192 

Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  in  1826, 
89;  opinion  of  Bryant,  105; 
opinion  of  Transcendentalism, 
143;  life  and  writings,  144-52; 
typically  American,  265  * 

Haync,  Paul,  225 

Hazard  of  New  Fortunes,  A, 
Ho  wells,  251 

Hearn,  Lafcadio,  248 

Hecker,  Father,  141 

Henry,  Patrick,  72,  209 

Herons  of  Elmwood,  The,  Long 
fellow,  156 

Hiawatha,  Longfellow,  155 

Higginson,  T.  W.,  142,  262 

Holmes,  O.  W.,  in  1826,  89;  at 
titude  toward  Transcendental 
ism,  143;  life  and  writings,  163- 
168;  died  (1894),  255 

Home  Sweet  Home,  Payne,  107 

Hooker,  Thomas,  21-22,  30-31 

Hoosier  Schoolmaster,  The,  Eg- 
gleston,  247 

House  of  the  Seven  Gables,  The, 
Hawthorne,  145,  150 

Hovey,  Richard,  257 

HoweUs,  W.  D.,  93,  234-35, 
250-51,  265 

Hubbard,  William,  39 

Huckleberry  Finn,  Clemens,  238 

Humorists,  American,  239 

Hutchinson,  Anne,  32 

Hutchinson,  Thomas,  12 

Hyperion,  Longfellow,  152 

Indian  Wars,  Hubbard,  3fl 
Indians,    in    literature,    37-40; 

Thcreau's  notes  on,  136 
Innocents  Abroad,  Clemens,  237, 

239 

Irving,    Washington,   89,    90-95 
Israfel,  Poe,  189,  192 

Jackson,  Andrew,  5 


Jackson,  Helen  Hunt,  248 
James,  Henry,  250,  251-55 
Jay,  John,  65 

Jefferson,  Thomas,  79-85,  265 
Jesuits  in  North  America,   The, 

Parkman,  185 

Jewett,  Sarah  Orne,  249,  250 
John  of  Barneveld,  Life  and  Death 

of,  Motley,  181 

Johnson,  Edward,  Captain,  38 
Joshua     Whitcomb,     Thompson, 

248 
Journal,  Emerson,  122,  125,  127, 

235 

Journal,  Thoreau,  134,  135 
Journal,  Woolman,  69 
Journal      and      Correspondence, 

Longfellow,  216 
Journalism,  in  the  colonies,  60- 

62;  in  20th  century,  263-64 

Kemble,  Fanny,  245-46 
Kennedy,  J.  P.,  245 
King,  Grace,  247 
King,  Starr,  262 
King  Philip's  War,  39-40 
King's  College  (Columbia),  62 
Knickerbocker  group  of  writers, 
89;  works  by,  270 

Languishing    Commonwealth, 

Walley.  41 

Lanier,  Sidney,  255-56 
La  Salle,  Parkman,  185 
Last  Leaf,  The,  Holmes,  166 
Last  of  the  Mohicans,  The,  Cooper, 

89,  98,  99 
Leather  slocking     Tales,    Cooper, 

97-99 
Leaves  of  Grass,  Whitman,  197, 

200,  202-03 
Letters,  Motley,  181 
Letters  from  an  American  Farmer, 

Crevecoeur,  60,  68 
Liberator.  The,  137,  217,  218 
Library  of  American  'Biography, 

176 
Life  on  the  Mississippi  Clemens, 

237 


INDEX 


277 


Ligeia,  Poe,  193 

Lincoln,  Abraham,  recognizes 
uncertainty  in  the  nation,  2; 
would  have  approved  Win- 
throp,  29;  address  at  Cooper 
Union  (1860),  104-05;  quoted, 
155;  as  a  writer  of  liberty,  208; 
character  and  writings,  226- 
233;  typically  American,  265 

Lionel  Lincoln,  Cooper,  98 

Literati,  Pope,  107 

Little  Women,  Alcott,  140 

London,  Jack,  243-44 

London  in  1724,  54-56 

Longfellow,  H.  W.,  in  1826,  89; 
attitude  toward  Transcendent 
alism,  143;  life  and  writings, 
152-57;  died  (1882),  255;  dis 
paragement  of,  267 

Longstreet",  A.  B.,  245 

Louisiana  Purchase,  88 

Lowell,  J.  II.,  in  1826,  90;  at 
titude  toward  Transcendental 
ism,  143;  life  and  writings, 
168-74;  died  (1891),  255;  typi 
cally  American,  265 

Luck  of  Roaring  Camp,  The, 
Harte,  241 

Lyceum  system,  175 

McFingal,  Trumbull,  69 
Magazines,    in   colonies,    60-61; 

in  20th  century,  263-64 
Magnalia      Christi      Americana, 

Mather,  46,  47 
Maidenhood,  Longfellow,  156 
Man  Who  Corrupted  Hadleyburg, 

The,  Clemens,  238 
Man  Without  a  Country,  Hale,  224 
Marble  Faun,   The,  Hawthorne, 

146,  151 
Marshes  of  Glynn,   The,  Lanier, 

255 

Martin  Chuzzlewit,  Dickens,  87 
Mason,  John,  Captain,  38 
Massachusetts  to  Virginia,  Whit- 
tier,  160 
Mather,      Cotton,     43,     45-48; 

diary,  46-47 


Mather,  Increase,  43 
Maud  Muller,  Whittier,  5-6 
Memorial  Odes,  Lowell,  172 
Miller,  C.  H.  (Joaquin),  244 
Ministers  Black  Veil,  The,  Haw 
thorne,  30 
Minister  s    Wooing,   The,  Stowe, 

223 

Modern  Instance,  A,  Howells,  251 
Montcalm  and  Wolfe,  Parkman, 

185 

Moody,  W.  V.,  257 
Morituri  Salutamus,  Longfellow, 

156 

Morris,  G.  P.,  107 
Mosses  from  an  Old  Manse,  Haw 
thorne,  145 
Motley,  J.  L.,  143-44,  176,  180- 

182 

Muir,  John,  244-45 
Murders  in  the  Rue  Morgue,  The, 

Poe,  194 
Murfree,  Mary  N.  (C.  E.  Crad- 

dock),  247 
My  Garden  Acquaintance,  Lowell, 

174 

My    Literary    Friends    and    Ac 
quaintances,  Howells,  251 
My  Literary  Passions,  Howells, 

250 

My  Lost  Youth,  Longfellow,  156 
My  Mark  Twain,  Howells,  251 
My  Psalm,  Whittier,  160 
My  Study  Windows,  Lowell,  170 
Mysterious  Stranger,  The,  Clem 
ens,  238 

National  Gazette,  71 

National  Literature,  Channing, 
112 

National  Ode,  Taylor,  255 

Nature,  Emerson,  123,  128,  131 

Nature-writing,  262 

Netherlands,  History  of  the  United, 
Motley,  181 

New  England,  a  digression  from 
English  society,  14;  at  the 
beginning  of  18th  century,  43- 
44;  characteristics  of  the  peo- 


278 


INDEX 


New  England — Continued 

pie  of,  109-11;    in  last  quar 
ter  of  19th  century,  248  et  seq. 
New  England,  History  of,  Win- 

throp,  28-29 

New  England  Courant,  61 
New  National  period  in  American 
literature,   234  et  seq.;  biblio 
graphy,  272 
New  York  at  beginning  of  18th 

century,  44 

New  York  Tribune,  140,  218 
Ncwburyport  Free  Press,  90,  159 
Newspapers,  in  colonies,  60-fll; 

in  20th  century,  263-64 
North  American  Review,  88,  103, 

104,  112,  170 

North  Carolina  in  1724,  44 
North  of  Boston,  Frost,  261 
Norwood,  Colonel,  27 

Oake,  Urian,  41 

Old  Creole  Days,  Cable,  246 

Old  Homestead,  The,  Thompson, 

248 

Old  Ironsides,  Holmes,  166 
Old  Manse,  119-20,  145 
Old  Regime,  The,  Parkman,  185 
Old  Swimmin'  Hole,  The,  Riley, 

247 
Oldtown  Fireside  Stories,  Stowe, 

223 

Oldtown  Folks,  Stowe,  223 
Olmsted,  F.  L.,  246 
On   a    Certain    Condescension   in 

Foreigners,  Lowell,  174 
Oratory  in  America,  208  et  seq. 
Oregon     Trail,     The,    Parkman, 

184 

Otis,  James,  72,  73 
Our  Hundred  Days,  Holmes,  168 
Outcast  of  Poker  Flat,  The,  Harte, 

242 

Outre-mer,  Longfellow,  152 
Overland  Monthly,  240 

Page,  T.  N.,  246,  247 
Paine,  Thomas,  74-76 
Parker,  Theodore,  115,  119,  141, 
206 


Parkman,  Francis,  143-44,  176. 

182-86 

Passage  to  India,  Whitman,  204 
Passionate    Pilgrim,    A,    James, 

253 

Pathfinder,  The,  Cooper,  99 
Pattee,  F.  L.,  236 
Paul  Revere 's  Ride,  Longfellow, 

155 

Paulding,  J.  K.,  107 
Payne,  J.  H.,  107 
Pennsylvania,  University  of,  62 
Pennsylvania  Gazette,  62 
Pennsylvania  Magazine,  74 
Pequot  War  (1637),  38-39 
Percy,  George,  27,  38 
Phelps,  Elizabeth  Stuart,  249 
Philip  II,  History  of  the  Reign  of, 

Prescott,  179 

Phillips,  Wendell,  208,  215-16 
Picture  of  New   York.  Mitchill, 

90 

Pilot,  The,  Cooper,  98 
Pioneers,  0  Pioneers,  Whitman, 

204 

Pioneers,  The,  Cooper,  97-98,  99 
Pioneers  of  France,   The,   Park 
man,  185 

Pirate,  The,  Scot,  98 
Plymouth  Plantation,  History  of, 

Bradford,  28-29 
Poe,  E.  A.,  "literature  of  escape, " 

8;  in  1826,  89;  in  New  York, 

108;  life  and  writings,  187-96 
Poet  at  the  Breakfast  Table,  The. 

Holmes,  168  ^ 
Poetry,  Revolutionary  verse,  69- 

72;  of   freedom,  223    et   seq.; 

of  the  20th  century,  260-61 
Poets    and    Poetry    of    America, 

Griswold,  107 

Poor  Richard,  Franklin.  20,  57 
Pory,  John,  27 
Prairie,  The,  Cooper,  98,  99 
Precaution,  Cooper,  97 
Prescott,  W.  H.,  89,  143-14,  176, 

178-80 

Present  Crisis,  The,  Lowell,  172 
Prince  of  Parthia,  The.  260 


INDEX 


279 


Professor  at  the  Breakfast  Table, 

The,  Holmes,  168 
Psalm  of  Life,  The,  Longfellow, 

156 

Psalm  of  the  West,  Lanier,  255 
Publick  Occurrences,  60 
Puritans,  The,  34-35 
Purloined  Letter,  The,  Poe,  193 

Quarterly,  The,  88 

Rainy  Day,  The,  Longfellow,  156 

Ramona,  Jackson,  248 

Ramoth  Hill,  Whittier,  138 

Raven,  The,  Poe,  192 

Read,  T.  B.,  225 

Reality  of  Spiritual  Life,  The, 
Edwards,  50 

Reaper  and  the  Flowers,  The, 
Longfellow,  153 

Red  Rover,  The,  Cooper,  98 

Religious  freedom  in  the  colonies, 
16 

Rene',  Chateaubriand,  96 

Repplier,  Agnes,  262 

Revolution,  influence  upon  liter 
ature,  66  et  seq.;  bibliography, 
270 

Rights  of  Man,  The,  Paine,  75 

Riley,  J.  W.,  247,  257-59 

Ripley,  George,  141 

Rise  of  Silas  Lapham,  The,  How- 
ells,  251 

Rise  of  the  Dutch  Republic,  Mot 
ley,  180 

Rivulet,  The,  Bryant,  106 

Robinson,  John,  11 

Roderick  Hudson,  James,  253 

Rolfe,  John,  38 

Romanticism  in  American  litera 
ture,  187  et  seq. 

Roosevelt,  Theodore,  243 

Roughing  It,  Clemens,  10,  237 

Rowlandson,  Mary,  39 

Rules  for  Reducing  a  Great  Em 
pire  to  a  Small  One,  Franklin, 
58 

Russell,  Irwin,  246 


Salem  "witchcraft,"  43 
Salmagundi  Papers,   Irving  and 

Paulding,  91 
Sanborn,  F.  B.,  142 
Sandys,  George,  27 
Scarlet  Letter,   The,  Hawthorne, 

7,  30,  145,  146,  148,  149-50 
School-Days,  Whittier,  158 
Scott,  Sir  Walter,  95 
Scribner's  Monthly,  256 
Scudder,  Horace,  169 
Seaweed,  Longfellow,  156 
Sewell,  Samuel,  Judge,  47-48 
Shepard,  Thomas,  16,  31-32 
Short  story,  the,  261-62 
Sill,  E.  R.,  257 
Simms,  W.  G.,  245,  246 
Simple  Cobbler  of  Agawam,  The, 

Ward,  37 
Sinners  in  the  Hands  of  an  Angry 

God,  Edwards,  50 
Skeleton  in  Armor,  The,  Longfel 
low,  155 

Sketch  Book,  Irving,  89,  91 
Skipper  Iresons  Ride,  Whittier, 

161 
Slavery,  influence  on  literature, 

207  et  seq. 
Slavery  in  Massachusetts,  Thor- 

eau,  137 

Smith,  F.  H.,  247 
Smith,  John,  8-10,  20,  38 
Smith,  Sydney,  quoted,  88-89 
Snow- Bound,  Whittier,  158,  161- 

162 
Snow-Image    and    Other    Tales, 

The,  Hawthorne,  145 
Songs  of  Labor,  Whittier,  161 
South  Carolina  in  1724,  44 
South,  The,  in  American  litera 
ture,  245  et  seq. 
Sparks,  Jared,  176 
Spofford,  Harriet  Prescott,  249 
Spoon  River  Anthology,  Masters, 

261 

Spy,  The,  Cooper,  89,  97,  98 
Stamp  Act  (1765),  59 
Star-Spangled  Banner,  The,  Key. 

107,  225 


280 


INDEX 


Stedman,  E.  C.,  225,  256 
Stowe,  Harriet  Beecher,  219-23. 

249 

Strachey,  William,  26,  38 
Summary  View  of  the  Rights  of 

British  America,  A,   Jefferson, 

80 

Sumner,  Charles,  216 
Sunthin     in    the   Pastoral   Line, 

Lowell,  174 

Tales  of  a  Traveler,  Irving,  91 
Tales  of  a  Wayside  Inn,  Long 
fellow,  155 
Tamerlane  and  Other  Poems,  Poe, 

89 

Taylor,  Bayard,  255 
Telling  the  Bees,  Whittier,  158 
Tennessee's  Partner,  Harte,  242 
Thanatopsis,   Bryant,    103,    104, 

106 

Thomas,  Edith,  257 
Thompson,  Denman,  248 
Thoreau,  H.  D.,  representative 
of  New  England  thought,  119; 
life     and     writings,     130-39; 
nature- writing,  262;  typically 
American,  265 

Ticknor,  George,  89,  111,  178,  216 
Timrod,  Henry,  225 
To  Helen,  Poe,  189,  192 
Tom  Sawyer,  Clemens,  238 
Tour  of  the  Prairies,  Irving,  91 
Transcendentalism,    111    et  seq., 

218;  bibliography,  270-71 
Tritemius,  Whittier,  161 
True  Relation,  Smith,  8-10,  25-26 
True  Repertory  of  the  Wrack  of 
Sir    Thomas   Gates,    Kt.    vpon 
and  from    the   Islands   of  the 
Bermudas,  Strachey,   26 
Tuckerman,  F.  G.,  quoted,  117 
Twain,  Mark,  see  Clemens,  S.  L. 
Twicetold  Tales,  Hawthorne,  148 
Tyler,  Professor,  64 

Ulalume,  Poe,  192 
Uncle   Tom's  Cabin,  Stowe,  98, 
208,  219,  220-23 


Union  of  the  Colonies,  Franklin, 

59 
Unitarianism,  112-13 

Verplanck,  J.  C.,  107 

Very,  Jones,  141 

Virginia,  a  continuation  of  Eng 
lish  society,  14;  in  1724,  44 

Virginia  House  of  Burgesses, 
Address  of  the,  Jefferson,  80 

Virginians,  The,  Thackeray,  45 

Vision  of  Sir  Launfal,  The,  Low 
ell,  170,  172 

Walden,  Thoreau,  131,  134,  135 

Walley,  Thomas,  41 

Warner,  C.  D.,  93 

Washington,  George,  64-65,  66, 
77-78 

Waterfowl,  To  a,  Bryant,  103, 
106 

WTebster,  Daniel,  eulogy  for 
Adams  and  Jefferson,  86-87; 
civic  note  in  oratory  of,  208; 
criticism  of  Clay,  210;  his 
oratory,  211-15 

Week  on  the  Concord  and  Merri- 
mac  Rivers,  A,  Thoreau,  131 

W7endeII,  Barrett,  6 

West,  The,  in  American  litera 
ture,  237  et  seq. 

Westchester  Farmer,  The,  Sea- 
bury,  76 

When  Lilacs  last  in  the  Door- 
yard  Bloomed,  Whitman,  201 

When  the  Frost  is  on  the  Punkin, 
Riley,  248 

Whitaker,  Alexander,  26-27,  38 

Whitman,  Walt,  in  1826,  90;  in 
New  York,  108;  life  and  writ 
ings,  196-205;  died  (1892),  255; 
typically  American,  265;  ar 
gues  for  American  books,  266 

Whittier,  J.  G.,  in  1826,  90;  at 
titude  towards  Transcendent 
alism,  143;  life  and  writings 
157-64;  died  (1892),  255 

William  and  Mary  College,  62 

William  Wilson,  Poe,  194 


INDEX 


281 


Williams,  Roger.  2. 16. 19.  32-34. 

38,  40-41 
Willis,  N.  P.,  107 
Winthrop,  John,  17.  18.  28-29 
Wirt,  William,  245 
Wister.  Owen,  243 
Wonder-Book,    The,  Hawthorne. 

145.  147 


Woodberry,  George,  257 
Woodworth,  Samuel.  107 
Woolman,  John.  69 
Wreck    of    the    Hesperus, 
Longfellow.  155 


The. 


Yale  University,  62 

Years  of  my  Youth,  Howells,  250 


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